Australia's ABC comes round to the sinking islands/floating islands issue

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

Kiribati on the move – but not sinking

Tuvalu and many other South Pacific Islands are not sinking, claims they are due to global warming driven sea level rise are opportunistic