Several people have emailed this article to me today, and it’s been posted in our spinoff links twice already: Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’.

The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker cites a Swedish “physicist,” Nils-Axel Mörner, who claims that every scientist and climate expert in the world is wrong, and that sea levels have not risen for 50 years.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

So who is Nils-Axel Mörner, and how is he able to see these things that every other scientist in the world can’t?

Well, in addition to his activities “debunking” climate change, Mörner is also an enthusiast of dowsing and water witching.

And he has some very weird ideas about archaeology. See here, here, here, and here.

And he is associated with fringe wacko/antisemite/conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. Here’s an interview (PDF) he did with the LaRouche publication Executive Intelligence Review.

And he is an “allied expert” with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, a group that is controlled by energy industry lobbyists.

Verdict: there may be credible scientists raising valid objections to anthropogenic climate change theory, but Nils-Axel Mörner is not one of them. He’s a raving kook.

UPDATE at 3/30/09 6:03:03 pm:

And it gets worse; in 2004 Mörner misrepresented his professional position in a presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences:

Dear Dr. Osipov:

It has come to my attention that Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner gave presentations at the seminar on climate change organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences at the request of President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. Dr. Mörner attacked the science of climate change, while claiming that he is President of the Commission on Sea Level Change of INQUA.

I am writing to inform you that Dr. Mörner has misrepresented his position with INQUA. Dr. Mörner was President of the Commission on Sea Level Change until July 2003, but the commission was terminated at that time during a reorganization of the commission structure of INQUA. Dr. Mörner currently has no formal position in INQUA, and I am distressed that he continues to represent himself in his former capacity. Further, INQUA, which is an umbrella organization for hundreds of researchers knowledgeable about past climate, does not subscribe to Mörner’s position on climate change. Nearly all of these researchers agree that humans are modifying Earth’s climate, a position diametrically opposed to Dr. Mörner’s point of view.

Sincerely,
John J. Clague
President, INQUA