If there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world, it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mrner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mrner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". The reason why Dr Mrner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that ... claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world". When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century.