Viv Forbes is caught red handed again at WUWT.

Viv Forbes is a director of a coal company in Australia. He has been caught red-handed telling fibs at WUWT in the past and he's at it again.

This time he's making up stuff about sea levels. (Anthony Watts doesn't accept the fact that seas will rise as the ice melts so he often puts up articles protesting rising seas.)

Viv starts off with a classic denier-ism:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

That's a variation of "the climate is always changing".  He then comes out as a fully-fledged denier, writing:

Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player. 

That's more than denial - with his "obviously an insignificant player". It includes a lie. Seas are currently rising at 3.2 mm a year, not 1 mm a year. This is what is happening to sea level, from the CU Sea Level Research Group of the University of Colorado:

If seas continued to rise at 3.2 mm a year it would give many of us time to adjust.  They won't though, will they. Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets are melting. They'll continue to melt and seas are going to rise a lot more in the future. In the not too distant future, probably while some people reading this are still alive, seas are going to rise much more quickly. By the end of this century seas could be anything from one to two metres higher than they are now. That's more than six feet for the metrically-challenged. And it won't happen evenly. Some decades could see a rapid rise in sea level, others not so much or none at all. It won't happen evenly everywhere at the same time either. Around the USA, for example, the melting of West Antarctica will cause a greater rise in sea level than in some other parts of the world.

From the WUWT comments

Some of the deniers aren't buying it. Greg Goodman, a regular at WUWT says:

June 17, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Viv Forbes “Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player.”

Well the accepted figure seems to be closer to 3mm/y so a bland assertion of “about 1mm per year” without any reference or uncertainty estimation is meaningless.

“not changed much” , “….obviously an insignificant player.”

Is that any better than an alarmists saying ” sea level has rise a lot, currently rising about 10mm/y. Man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously a significant player.”

This is the sort of unfounded commentary that rightly draws criticism of being “anti-science” and justifies comments of being “in denial”.

” climate alarmists say we should be scared to death by the threat of seas rising gently at 1mm PER YEAR.”

Sorry that is an out and out lie. It is non factual and you know it is non factual. It is also totally unsubstantiated. Provide one quote from anyone to back that up. No one is saying we should “scared to death” about 1mm/y. Is anyone but Viv Forbes even suggesting such a figure? He appears to have just made it up.

Why Anthony chose to publish this I can not understand. It does nothing but justify those who would criticise WUWT and sceptics in general.

Hector Pascal says:

June 18, 2014 at 12:08 am
You have to be very cautious using historical examples of sea level change from tectonically active areas such as the Mediterranean. Vertical movements can be very large and rapid. I am familiar with and have visited the coast (mountainous/rias) in closest proximity to the Tohoku earthquake epicentre. Harbour quays that previously had about a metre of freeboard were awash. That’s just one event.

Also, areas responding to ice sheet melting are still going up, and areas peripheral to the ice sheets are still going down as the mantle material flows back to where it was displaced from. For example, in the UK, land north of a line going approximately from the Humber to the Severn is rising, and land south of that line is sinking.