In 2003, Nils-Axel Mörner and his colleagues (see below) pub-lished a well-documented paper showing that sea levels in the Maldives have fallen substantially - fallen! - in the last 30 years. I find it curious that we haven't heard about this.

"The Maldives in the central Indian Ocean consist of some 1,200 individual islands grouped in about 20 larger atolls," says Mörner. In-as-much as the islands rise only three to seven feet above sea level, they have been condemned by the IPCC to flooding in the near future.

Mörner disagrees with this scenario. "In our study of the coastal dynamics and the geomorphology of the shores," writes Mörner, "we were unable to detect any traces of a recent sea level rise.

On the contrary, we found quite clear morphological indications of a recent fall in sea level."

Mörner's group found that sea levels stood about 60 cm higher around A.D. 1150 than today, and more recently, about 30 cm higher than today.

"From the shape and freshness," Mörner says, "one would assume that the sea level fall took place in the last 50 years, or so."

In the last 50 years!

I find it difficult to understand how the IPCC could have missed this information - unless they did it deliberately.

All they had to do was ask the locals.

"Local people report that the dhonis (local fishing boats) could pass straight across theMaduvvare Falhus thila in the 1970s and 1980s," Mörner reports, "whilst they in the last 15 years have had to make a detour around the thila, because it is now too shallow. The thila has not grown, so it must be the sea that has fallen."

"In the IPCC scenarios," Mörner concludes, "the Maldives were condemned to disappear in the near future." "Our documentation of actual field evidence contradicts this hypothesis."

From "New perspectives for the future of the Maldives" Nils-Axel Mörner, Michael Tooley, and Göran Possnert, Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 40, Issues 1-2, Jan 2004, pp 177-182

Nils-Axel Mörner, Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Michael Tooley, Geography and Archaelogy, University of Durham, Durham, UK

Göran Possnert, The Angstrom Laboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden

Read entire paper (for a fee) here