“Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat”

'We've nothing to worry about – climate change is just a myth'. I'm quite sure you have heard that said before. But is it? Climate change scepticism is nothing new. Most aspects have been contested both in the media and in academia. You might like to know that sea level rise doesn't escape the net either. To gain a more reliable view we should take a look at the bigger picture rather than just cherry picking particular studies that might back-up our argument or by looking at small time scales without thinking about how these might appear differently if we examined more data.

Luckily, scepticism is not such a bad thing. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote ‘Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat’ suggests, something can be gained from opposing arguments and debate. Jerry Mitrovica, Professor of Geophysics at Harvard, thinks the value in his field is that sceptics ‘force us to look at sea level with a renewed interest and insight that will help us go into the future’. His talk given at an interdisciplinary climate change meeting in 2011 can be watched below.

While I would encourage you to watch as it was informative and relatively easy to understand, I will try to sum up the key arguments of sceptics which the talk is structured around.

• 2 mm/year is not anomalous – sea level has been rising at this rate for thousands of years.
• Sea level change varies dramatically from place to place – melting ice sheets cannot be the culprit.
• Even so, 2 mm/year is small and stable.

I don’t want to give the game away straight away (in case you want to watch the talk) so my next post in a few days time will explore how Mitrovica challenges the claims of sceptics and where this leaves societies at risk.