UPDATED: Note that this tip was spurred by this discussion at Andrew Bolt’s today, and I failed to note the date of the ABC story was in 2010, and I apologize for any confusion, but there’s also relevant news today. Bolt writes: Look at this other drowning island, the Global Mail writer insisted. So I did…
Bolts adds:
A new paper published in the AGU’s house journal Eos Transactions shows why caution is often justified. Here … is the 1993-2011 sea level trend data from Tarawa atoll, part of Kiribati in the central Pacific:
Whoa! No sea-level rise there, then. And yet of course climate campaigners – and even the Kiribati government – understandably anxious to highlight the future existential threat to the islands, have used storm surges, flooding events and suchlike as evidence of current sea-level rise impacts. Which they are almost certainly not, at least not in Tarawa atoll anyway…
First this story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (h/t to Paul Ostergaard)
“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, gotten larger,” he said.
“Some of those islands have gotten dramatically larger, by 20 or 30 per cent.
“We’ve now got evidence the physical foundations of these islands will still be there in 100 years.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-06-03/pacific-islands-growing-not-sinking/851738
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From the “we told you so” department comes this essay from Willis Eschenbach:
Since (as Darwin showed) atolls float up with the sea level, the idea that they will be buried by sea level rises is totally unfounded. Despite never being more than a few metres tall, they have survived a sea level rise of up to three hundred plus feet (call it a hundred metres) within the last twenty thousand years. Historically they have floated up higher than the peaks of drowned mountains.
So the third claim is not true either. Atolls are created by sea level rise, not destroyed by sea level rise.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
And as I and others have pointed out, the sea level scare is just another money making enterprise, as evidenced by the increase in airport expansion, among other things.
Message to Maldives president Mohammed Nasheed: your claims are BS
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Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
Oops, sea levels aren’t rising. Now what do we do?
Who would have thunk that the forces that created the island in the first place, did not pack up and go home once man discovered it.
The more neutrals in the cagw debate see the scare stories being debunked, the quicker we can all get back to sorting out the real problems in the world.
When scientists are “surprised” it means either they haven’t been paying attention, or it goes against their cherished beliefs, and could jeopardize their future careers. With climate scientologists, I’m guessing the latter.
We knew this, but note that the ABC story is 3 years old!
That ABC article is three years old… or am I missing something?
REPLY: No, other than I was in a hurry this morning to provide a couple of posts before going to a long appointment and thought the tip given to me was in fact a new story. It doesn’t make the Atoll issue any less valid though. – Anthony
Can we have our millions in extorted climate guilt money back now, please?
The obsessive-compulsive alarmists are in a panic now … its worse than they thought!! There is no problem and they need lots of scary problems, preferably scarier than the last scary story to keep the AGW gravy train flowing.
“… challenges views …”
I think they meant to say “… debunks propaganda …”
The ABC are a bit slow….
….. even the BBC knew about his.. ages ago… (3 years ago)
BBC – Low-lying Pacific islands ‘growing not sinking’ – June 2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10222679
Depending on what side you’re on, lots of good or bad news this week…
hang on – old news at the ABC as well (same story) ABC dated 2010?
Hang on a minute. That ABC article is actually quite pessimistic about the problems related to sea-level rise:
“Sea levels are obviously rising … the key problem is that sea level rise is likely to accelerate much beyond what we’ve seen in the 20th century. Naomi Thirobaux, from Kiribati, has studied the shape of Pacific islands for her PhD and says no-one should be lulled into thinking erosion and inundation is not taking its toll and displacing people from their land. “In a populated area what would happen was that if it’s eroding, a few metres would actually displace people,” she said.”
Why didn’t you tackle that part of the news article?
Also, as far as I can recall, Darwin never said that atolls “floated” with sea level rise. Atolls are anchored to the sea-bed. They were indeed formed by rising sea levels (or subsiding land levels), but on very, very long time scales. I’m not sure anybody knows whether they can continue to follow sea level rise on a short time scale.
Finally, you still recognize that sea levels are rising, so what about the coastal areas that have nothing to do with atolls? How do you expect them to cope?
Best regards.
The story is from 2010.
Aww! Pesky facts!
Let’s declare “War on Facts!” immediately – like we have declared “War on Drugs!” and “War on Terrah!” already – because these two have demonstrably worked sooooo well for us, either…
http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/kiribati-a-nation-going-under/590/ is the original alarmist story reported to and commented on by Andrew Bolt, who replied with the posting referenced here from the ABC.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_global_mail_wails_about_the_vanishing_islands_of_kiribati
and yet again at
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/look_at_this_other_drowning_island_the_global_mail_writer_insisted_so_i_did/
His satellite photos and the reference to the ABC story seem to do a fairly good job debunking the Global Mail story dated April 15 2013 is the current one drawing comment in Australia.
OMG ITZ SINKING NOT!!!
The Island of Kiribati a time lapse view from 1984 to 2012
http://earthengine.google.org/#intro/v=1.8668577,-157.35992020000003,9.510624971357084
It´s worse than we thought!
If the oceans fill up with atolls, sea level will raise at an unprecedented rate.
Meanwhile carbon dioxide in the water will kill the corals, and women will be forced to offer sexual services to locusts who will cover the droughtridden parts of the world that is still above water. Oh, and flesheating fungus will devour them and everyone else (except thelocusts). It´s Science, you cant argue with that!
Garrett says:
May 16, 2013 at 8:24 am
“Finally, you still recognize that sea levels are rising, so what about the coastal areas that have nothing to do with atolls? How do you expect them to cope?”
======================================================
You’re right. They will all drown. SLR is so slow no one will see it coming. They’ll just keep propagating in deeper and deeper water till they can’t breathe. And then they’ll blame it on overpopulation instead of Global Warming.
FYI the great river deltas are only as old as the Holocene–they keep building up as sea level rises, just like atolls. Or at least they would if people would quit diking them up and interfering with sedimentation. It seems that people living along rivers get flooded more than those along coasts. Of course this should be blamed on Global Warming rather than riverside overpopulation. And if the poor people in Japan and Indonesia had paid more attention to SLR (of 3mm/year–with no sign of acceleration) than tsunami danger many of them would have survived–they just don’t understand anything about crap shoots and odds and orders of magnitude.
So no, I don’t expect them to cope. Let them eat lifesavers. –AGF
I was taught as a geological undergrad in the 1950s that the coral reefs began as a necklace around a volcano rising out of the sea floor. Once established, sea level rise resulted in death of deeper parts of the reef but new growth maintained the top part. When sea level falls, the exposed coral dies, wave action breaks up the coral and pushes the detritus into the lagoon. The rise in sea level with melt back of the Pleistocene ice sheets was ~120 metres. The coral kept pace this growth. Drilling on Bikini Atoll for atomic bomb test, the coral formation was found to be~ 120 metres and the rock below it was basalt. And now this is news to scientists? As in the Dark Ages when we ‘forgot’ that the earth was spherical we had to wait two millennia to rediscover this during the beginning of the Enlightenment. I hope no one gets a PhD or, horrors, a Nobel Prize for this ‘discovery’. The ignorance of scientists today is apalling. I blame almost the lot of them when it gets to far as to be published in a scientific journal. I hope some criticize this paper in the journal.
Mark this well! We will soon be seeing another scientific ‘breakthrough’ when they discover that the same thing is true of deltas like the Ganges, Mississippi, etc. If you drill down …wait for it!… ~120 metres you intersect river gravel and then bedrock. As sea level rose with the melting ice , the sea encroached up the river, but this causes the river flow to slow at that point and drop much of its sediment, thereby building up a delta.. Further sea level rise and etc. the delta grows outward into the gulf creating new land. If sea level falls, wave action erodes the deltaic deposits down and the river mouth recesses back upstream. Don’t worry about sea level rise, worry about the sea level falling!! I’ve commented on these two issues several times in WUWT over the years (is there some way to search this?)
The Maldives will be jolly pleased then that their four new airports won’t be underwater next year!
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/maldives-opening-four-new-underwater-airports/
But its not just island extent, its island quality. 😉
Gary Pearse says:
May 16, 2013 at 9:41 am
“As in the Dark Ages when we ‘forgot’ that the earth was spherical we had to wait two millennia to rediscover this during the beginning of the Enlightenment…”
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In a website dedicated to debunking fallacies, this is another one worth debunking: at no time during the “Dark Ages” was it believed that the earth was flat. The myth of a medieval flat earth is a fine example of generally accepted “truths” like CACC that have no basis in fact. Columbus, like his peers, was raised and died believing the sun revolves around the earth. He contributed as much to cosmology as Yuri Gagarin. –AGF
The story does appear to be from 2010, however that does not make what Bruce said any less true, or right on target.
Bruce Cobb says:
May 16, 2013 at 7:58 am
When scientists are “surprised” it means either they haven’t been paying attention, or it goes against their cherished beliefs, and could jeopardize their future careers. With climate scientologists, I’m guessing the latter.
Right on Bruce.
Carti Sugdub:
http://wp.me/p1QpKD-rW