The Australian - climate madness again

The old Maldives story rehashed for the umpteenth time by The Australian (see here and here). It starts off with the usual scaremongering nonsense:

AMONG the many grim predictions of climate change experts, the future fate of The Maldives stands out as a genuine doomsday scenario, with the island chain nation facing nothing short of extinction.

A 1m rise in sea level would almost totally submerge the country's 1,192 coral islands scattered off the southern tip of India. Experts predict a rise of at least 18cm is likely by the end of the century.

Oh, please. I thought we'd moved on from this. Sea levels have been rising at 1-2 mm per year since the last Ice Age, so 18cm in a century is bang on target (which, by the way, has nothing to do with "global warming" or that evil trace gas CO2). Some experts go even further, such as Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University, quoted in The Australian just two weeks ago:

Our research data does not lend support to any such flooding scenario, however. On the contrary, we find no signs of any ongoing sea-level rise. Our results comes from visits to numerous islands ... and includes coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating.

Present sea level was reached about 4500BC. In the past 4000 years, sea level oscillated around the present. In the past decade, there are no signs of any rise in sea level. Hence, we are able to free the islands from the condemnation to become flooded in the 21st century.

And none of this mentions the possibility of tectonic movement of the land itself downwards...

Read it here.