The case for Global Warming does not hinge on a tenth of a degree Celsius or a few experts quibbling over the technical details behind a graph of carbon emissions. What the Carbonistas need is something with emotional impact. Tsunamis fit the bill. So their present case hinges upon the sea-level records. It won’t last. Their case will shift again when the scientific community refuses to kow-tow to their paymasters by permitting misleading use of their data. But it has served their purpose well. Truth after all is not where it’s at. With the Fear Factory perception is all…from a Goebbel‘s Primer.

So the Climate Changelings are shining their spotlights on helpless, victimized, impoverished people being flooded out of their ancestral homelands. They talk of the terror of sea levels rising precipitously…and inexplicably…with no conceivable cause. They tell of extraordinary events and unprecedented happenings affecting the entire world in recent years. Something unknown is causing sea levels to rise and threaten innocent men, women and children.

The idea is that if a convincing record can be shown of rising sea levels then the Carbonistas will be on very strong ground. When the public and the policy makers commanding the public purse strings…insurance companies for instance…see the damage that has been done and the costs they might incur…and here the computer modellers come into their own…they will spend money to solve the problem and scan the horizon for someone to blame for the mess.

Grappling with problems is not what action-oriented types do. They define, act and solve. They get it sorted. Then they look for someone to blame…and somebody else to pay the bill. So not only is the sea level data important to the Carbonista’s Bait & Switch Strategy but the fact that sea levels are rising around the world must be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately that’s the rub. There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings. One of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface.

Then there are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. Even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple.

Were this enough to determine the precise scientific nature of sea level data, a consensus about this data might be feasible even if some agreed to disagree. However there would be many different hypotheses about the causes of any drift or sudden shift in the data pattern. But unfortunately for the Carbonistas this is likely to be the wrong consensus.

One of several places around the Indian Ocean decimated by the Boxing Day Tsunami was The Maldive Islands. But it would be quite wrong to think that the inhabitants of these islands had been sitting on the beach for the past few decades waiting for the tsunami to strike. They had arranged for a team of Scandinavian researchers to study sea levels in the ocean around them. The scientists found no rise in several centuries…and a fall in the last twenty years.

Michael Crichton started his research for State of Fear...published in 2004...in 2001. At that time I was reading through Tom Clancy’s published works and was somewhat alarmed to notice that many of Clancy’s plots turned up in the real world a few years after he had seemingly invented them. I had two conspiratorial explanations. Either Clancy was on a retainer with the CIA or Mossad were reading the plot outlines he sent to his publisher.

Crichton and Clancy plots have wheels within wheels and move rapidly between different pieces of the action before bringing it all together in one hectic final sequence. Their plots are full of outrageous and improbable coincidences and...as in the old Westerns...the hero comes through unscathed while the baddies and the secondary good guys go down like flies. That’s not a problem for me...it’s the nature of the genre. But one of Crichton’s subplots worries me.

The Island of Gareda is one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea north of Australia. Here the Pacific Plate slides under the Ontong Java Plateau resulting in the Solomon Trench...a huge underwater feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain and is an active geological region with a deep trench. Along the length of the trench are undersea volcanoes with lots of slope debris and therefore the potential for undersea landslides which displace enormous volumes of water very quickly...the most common way a tsunami is formed.

In Crichton’s book the really really bad guy heads up a global environmental organisation. The underlying action that provides the fiendish plot for the novel involves three earth shattering natural disasters...each timed to take place on the first morning of a conference on Abrupt Climate Change...a lightning-induced flash flood in Yellowstone National Park, an enormous ice floe breaking off from a glacier in Antarctica and...you are there before me...a tsunami activated by giant Hypersonic Cavitators placed on the seabed off the Island of Gareda.