From the AAAS Science Magazine and the department of “we told you so” again, and again, and again, comes this “revelation”.
Warming may not swamp islands
by Christopher Pala Science 1 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6196 pp. 496-497 DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6196.496
In an interview with CNN last month, Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, insisted that rising sea levels due to global warming will mean “total annihilation” for this nation of 33 coral islands in the Central Pacific and for other atoll island nations like Tuvalu and the Maldives.
In May, Kiribati bought 22 square kilometers of land in Fiji as a haven for displaced citizens, cementing Kiribati’s reputation as an early victim of climate change. No doubt, the sea is coming: Global sea levels are expected to rise up to 1 meter by 2100. But recent geologic studies suggest that the coral reefs supporting sandy atoll islands will grow and rise in tandem with the sea. The only Pacific atoll islanders who will have to move must do so for the same reason as millions of people on the continents: because they live too close to shore.
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h/t Paul Ostergaard
Unfortunately, the article is paywalled, if anyone has access drop me a note please. See update below.
Besides the posts from Willis and Andy above on how atolls like Kiribati float and move (unless you kill all the coral, Alling et al. 2007 shows Kirbati is ground zero for El Nino warming, plus there’s contributing environmental mis-management), the biggest fly in the ointment for the claim made by the current president of Kiribati is the fact that the Maldives (which is also mostly atolls and also claims to be threatened by sea level rise, but it isn’t true) are building new airports for tourism.
One, Kooddoo, is already open for business.
The main airport is adding a new modern passenger terminal, seen in this concept video:
And then there’s this from Wikipedia about the Male airport:
The agreement signed between the Maldives government and GMR Group included the upgrading and renovation of the airport up to the standard of a global airport by the year 2014. GMIAL announced that the development plans included reclaiming more land at the eastern end of the runway; where a new terminal is to be built. This terminal will consist of 3 separate bridged buildings. Plans for a separate cargo terminal was also announced.[15]
The Maldives, for all its troubles and supposed climate worries, doesn’t seem to get the fact that the last thing you do is spend money on new airports, passenger terminals, and cargo terminals on the islands you are supposedly going to have to eventually abandon.
Having your hand out for “climate change trust money” while building new airports to handle increased tourism doesn’t wash. “Scam” is too nice of a word to use here.
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UPDATE: The article has been made available to me, thanks Joel O’Bryan. Excerpts below.
Studies suggest that atoll islands will rise in step with a rising sea
By Christopher Pala, on South Tarawa
As the minibus wobbles over the dusty, pothole-filled road that runs the length of South Tarawa island, a song blasting over Kiribati’s state radio envisions an apocalypse for this fishhook-shaped atoll halfway between Honolulu and Fiji: “The angry sea will kill us all.” The song, which won a competition organized by Kiribati’s government, reflects the views of President Anote Tong, who has been warning for years of a knockout punch from climate change.
…
No doubt, the sea is coming: In a 2013 report, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that global sea levels will rise up to 1 meter by 2100. But recent geologic studies suggest that the coral reefs supporting sandy atoll islands will grow and rise in tandem with the sea. The only islanders who will have to move must do so for the same reason as millions of people on the continents: because they live too close to shore.
Paul Kench, a geomorphologist who now heads the University of Auckland’s School of Environment in New Zealand, was the first to question the dire forecasts for Kiribati and similar island nations. In 1999, the World Bank asked him to evaluate the economic costs of sea-level rise and climate change to Pacific island nations. Kench, who had been studying how atoll islands evolve over time, says he had assumed that a rising ocean would engulf the islands, which consist of sand perched on reefs. “That’s what everyone thought, and nobody questioned it,” he says. But when he scoured the literature, he could not find a single study to support that scenario.
So Kench teamed up with Peter Cowell, a geomorphologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, to model what might happen. They found that during episodes of high seas—at high tide during El Niño events, which raise sea level in the Central Pacific, for example—storm waves would wash over higher and higher sections of atoll islands. But instead of eroding land, the waves would raise island elevation by depositing sand produced from broken coral, coralline algae, mollusks, and foraminifera.
Kench notes that reefs can grow 10 to 15 mill imeters a year—faster than the sea-level rise expected to occur later this century. “As long as the reef is healthy and generates an abundant supply of sand, there’s no reason a reef island can’t grow and keep up,” he argues. This equilibrium may not mean that all areas of atolls will remain habitable, says Scott Smithers, a geomorphologist at James Cook University, Townsville, in Australia. “The changes might happen at a rate that exceeds the recovery,” he says. But the geologic record is reassuring, Kench and others found when they drilled deep cores into reef islands to probe how they responded to past sea-level changes. In a February report in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers found that the island of Jabat in the Marshall Islands emerged on a reef 4800 to 4000 years ago, when sea levels were rising as fast as they are expected to rise over the next century. Other support for the model has come from monitoring how shorelines respond to seasonal
…
Vanua Levu in Fiji is a less appealing refuge. The purchase was “a publicity stunt,” scoffs Teburoro Tito, a former president of Kiribati and member of the opposition party Protect the Maneaba. Already home to 270 farmers from the Solomon Islands, the steep, hilly tract may accommodate only a few hundred more people. If the optimists are right, no one from Kiribati will have to leave their country anyway.
■ Christopher Pala is a writer in Washington, D.C
There is an interesting historical footnote concerning the Maldives and this concerns the beautiful cowrie shells that proliferate there. These were in ancient times used as an international currency and hordes of coins and cowrie shells have been found as far away as the Baltic. Fishing and the sale of seashells is the traditional occupations of the Maldivians and they might come to regret the new source of tourist wealth that now over looms them.
A number of people have referred to Darwin, and yes Darwin made a good observation. However, don’t use only Darwin’s observations when tackling Warmists. They will say it’s “not peer reviewed”. Use the two references I gave above here. You can still mention Darwin but back it up from the peer review.
Jimbo:
At August 1, 2014 at 7:51 am you say
But I want to mention Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle that went from and returned to here in Falmouth. We even have a plaque on the wall to mark the spot where Darwin got on the coach to take him home after he unloaded from the Beagle.
Richard
It’s funny how Darwin has basically become a cult hero for atheists/academics who like to feel superior to those dumb creationist conservatives. Darwin Day and all that. Yet barely any of them know about his work on carnivorous plants, earthworms, and so many other things. Ask a liberal sometime what Darwin’s other contributions to science were. Shoot, ask them the name of the ship. Better yet ask them what his career path was before he was offered the position on The Beagle 🙂 They don’t know anything other than evolution proves those dumb Christians wrong so there.
I totally believe in evolution, and Darwin is truly one of my heroes, I just hate these hypocrites.
I’m assuming that this isn’t the “big data” Ban-Brains Moon and his cadre of climate kleptocrats are looking for.
“There is a need for fresh evidence that strengthens the economic case for action on climate change to show where such action is feasible, affordable and effective. The 2014 Climate Summit represents a turning point from climate change awareness to action. Therefore the Big Data Climate Challenge calls upon the international academic, scientific, technology and policy communities to highlight data-driven evidence to drive climate action.
The Big Data Climate Challenge will source projects from around the world that use Big Data and analytics to address real world impacts of climate change. This initiative will help build public understanding of how Big Data can reveal critical insights for strengthening resilience and mitigating emissions.”
I’m sure if they search for it, though, they’ll find something – almost anything will do at this point.
The push is on for fresh propaganda for their upcoming NY climate scarefest in September.
http://www.unglobalpulse.org/big-data-climate
Kinda reminds me of all the money being spent by the Canadians, Russians, and even the US, building new, bigger ice breakers for the Arctic. What’s the point if it is all going to melt.
tty – You are incorrect in asserting that sea levels weren’t higher in the past based upon some current sea level atolls. You just need to look at southern Florida and islands like Turks and Caicos. The latter is entirely derived from coral reefs and they are as much as 100 feet higher than present sea level.
And there are many instances of stranded raised beaches in the Arctic many tens of feet higher than present sea level. Oceans were both much lower (during ice ages) and much higher higher than present.
The surprising thing here is that so few “climatologists” seem to have any familiarity with natural earth history.
Mike Geo:
It is no surprise. Most “climatologists” are self- styled as such and are in fact only theoretical physicists or mathematicians with very little exposure to or understanding of the other natural sciences. This lack, however, does not prevent them from delving into those fields in which they lack understanding. Thus the execrable quality of their work such as is displayed repeatedly here and at other websites. Scientists in other fields know that their work is abominable, but it is alarmism that rules the media. A paper cannot sell copy with headlines that read ” NO NEED TO WORRY”
Some links I use all the time –
http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/projects/spslcmp/data/monthly.shtml
Example from the selections: Kiribati sea level – http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70060/IDO70060SLI.pdf
They just poked themselves in the eye (freshwater lens) with a stick.
The ‘powers that be’ in Kiribati have apparently recognized that playing the role of ‘climate victim’ will get them a lot of publicity, which in turn will draw ecotourism.
What is not important is whether the islands will eventually be inundated.
What *is* important is that the publicity brings in money.
“Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that global sea levels will rise up to 1 meter by 2100”. Why would anyone think the IPCC sea level predictions are any better than their global temperature predictions.
Philip Mulholland says:
“The island of Barbados is another example for your list, the spectacular Harrison’s Cave is well worth a visit.”
Actually Barbados is a rather special case. It was never a true atoll. It is one of a very few oceanic islands that is actually a piece of sea-bottom pushed up above sea-level. True, most of Barbados is coral limestone, but it has grown around a core of Eocene to Miocene deep-water sediments (sandstones, clay, turbidites and deepwater limestone) accreted where the Atlantic and South American plates meet, and then pushed up above sea level.These outcrop in the northeastern part of the island
This is most unusual. The only somewhat analoguous cases I know of are St Pauls Rocks and Macquarie Island.
Don Easterbrook says
“When post-glacial sea level rose, the coral reefs grew upward as fast as sea level rose (about 1 meter/century). Drilling on Bikini Island prior to atomic testing there, showed that the coral was many hundreds of feet thick and could only have gotten that thick by upward reef growth as fast as island subsidence and sea level rise.”
No, they didn’t. See my post of 2:28 AM above. The great thickness of coral limestone under most atolls hasn’t accumulated in just one glacial period. It has grown ever since the volcanic island that was to become the atoll started to subside, usually several million years ago, as Darwin already understood almost two hundred years ago.
mikegeo says:
“tty – You are incorrect in asserting that sea levels weren’t higher in the past based upon some current sea level atolls. You just need to look at southern Florida and islands like Turks and Caicos. The latter is entirely derived from coral reefs and they are as much as 100 feet higher than present sea level.
And there are many instances of stranded raised beaches in the Arctic many tens of feet higher than present sea level. Oceans were both much lower (during ice ages) and much higher higher than present.
The surprising thing here is that so few “climatologists” seem to have any familiarity with natural earth history.”
I’m quite familiar with Florida and the Bahama bank (and Yucatan, and much of Italy to take two other large carbonate platforms). You have to remember that most parts of the Earth are always moving up or down, albeit slowly. However if MIS 5e och MIS 11 sea-levels had been much higher than at present you would expect most atolls to be raised which they are not.
High level shorelines in the Arctic are due to isostatic rebound after the last ice-age, not high sea-levels. In e. g. northern Sweden (where the center of the European ice-cap was situated) there are raised beaches 900 feet above sea-level less than 10,000 years old and the land is still rising about 1 cm per year.
As for the constant rise and fall of the land it is worth noting that shorelines from the last interglacia (117,000-127,000 years ago) can now be found word-wide from 350 meters below sea-level to 950 meters above it, though most are between zero and ten meters above sea-level.
I can agree that ´climate scientists’ (which isn’t the same as climatologists) are remarkably ignorant of geology and other earth sciences, while geologists are mostly tend to be sceptical of CAGW.
tty says:
August 1, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Do you mean the Caribbean Plate? There isn’t an Atlantic Plate.
TTY:
you seem fairly well up on the subject.
However, to give Don Easterbrook his due, he also gave subsidence as a factor which I think covers all aspects of reef (carbonate) build up of the atolls. You seem to read his meaning as referring to SL rise only, but he appears to have included tectonic considerations as well.
Have you heard of the so-called chenier ridges of south Louisiana? These are ancient Pleistocene shorelines- thought to have been barrier islands.
They do have to worry. They are all built on seamounts – underwater volcanic systems. While they are hot, they stand up like boils. Once the heat is removed, and that magma cools, it will sink back down into the asthenosphere lickety-split. The coral might make it survive a while, but like the north end of the Hawaiian chain, ultimately they succumb to gravity. Maybe we need a new class of victims: “Refugees of geology”. Should allow any and all to come to the USA and get on welfare.
In my yachting news letter I noticed an article about Ocean Watch. http://www.oceanwatch.org
These characters sail around the Pacific and “save” coral reefs, teach locals about Climate Change and teach them “Sustainable” practices and how to adapt to the coming climate holocaust. Well that’s what they say on their website.
To me this smells of the United Nations, but this is not obviously supported by their web site, until I noticed on this page http://www.oceanswatch.org/#!news-resources/cjjw under “Our Sponsors” “The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund”.
Now who funds this even more UN sounding organisation?
Well a huge list of “Partners” at http://www.cepf.net/partners/Pages/default.aspx Including the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury (both in New Zealand) and then the United Nations Foundation.
In other words the worlds taxpayers are paying for this junket/propaganda organisation. No wonder Pacific Islands are crying that they are sinking and the naughty wealthy taxpayers of the world should bail them out when their islands are more likely to be sinking.
Interestingly enough I noticed a New Zealand Company as a recipient of the largess of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, (one of a very long list),, a company called
“NEW ZEALAND BUTTERFLY ENTERPRISES” . I looked it up and was incorporated in 2004 but is now in the liquidation list.
Only one share holder and one share. Well it appears that one junket deserves another. At any rate it appear to be a pretty poor investment on the part of “The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund”.
Mm food for thought.
Anyway I was right about the UN involvement!
I think it is worth checking the pedigree of any organisation like these in order to realise how the United Nations is leaving no stone unturned in spreading their phont message and science.
Cheers
Roger http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
ps. For the record but off the top of my head, IPCC AR4 and AR5 predict ( I recall), 7 meters of sea level rise on account of the Greenland ice cap melting completely.
The timing of this event? AR4 says “millenia” or more than 2,000 years – AR5 says “more than a millenium” . Thats about 3.5 mm per year or 175mm 350mm per century. Of course both publications admit that Antarctic ice on average is actually increasing.
So once again skeptics, as well as Darwin, are proven correct: CO2 will not be drowning the world’s coral atolls.
So please tell us again: Just who is in the flat earth society?
I’m still waiting for 50 million Climate Refugees,I guess they decided to stay home.<:o)
” gccross says:
August 1, 2014 at 7:14 pm
I’m still waiting for 50 million Climate Refugees,I guess they decided to stay home.<:o)"
Ummm…that's one excuse they haven't used, yet, for the influx through the Mexican border.
Actually I was in Kiribati last summer. We stopped at Funafuti and was I amazed, they didn’t allow us to burn our garbage on the island. No they said they would give us a fine did we bring anything. So we asked what to do, the answer “throw it in the ocean when you leave the atoll” was even more stunning. However we did bring our garbage and had it burnt anyway, just made sure there was no government people around …
When we was passing the airfield, yes there is one that is still working, and before the weekly flight arrives they have a couple of cars driving around honking the horn to make the pigs go away. There were three or four pigs running loose at the runway. Then there was all the dogs. Yes, they still eat dogs too. But the thing to talk about was that when we was at the airport we passed a building with a lot of people sitting like in school. There it was, they had information about climate change or global warming. I just had to start asking people around and sure enough. Not one single person was afraid the water was raising or aware of it. They thought the sea was just the same, no raise at all. But when I asked about the global warming and how that may affect them, suddenly they know about the water raising and a lot of other things.
There was a couple of persons who also told me about the corruption among the government people or leading class. They god rich the last 20 years and many now have condo’s in Hawaii. There was also a court ruling last year about this. The United States had sued one of the leaders, but he got off the hook because his relative was the judge …
So, for me, I will not send one dollar …. They live on aid and get a lot. They actually have cars on the small atoll with 2-3 km of roads. Most people has motorcycles. We walked and it took less than half an hour from one end of the island to the other.
I wish the guilt money actually came from alarmists, and only from alarmists.
In the long term the Maldives are doomed, but it has nothing to do with the Global Warming scam. Wiki …
The Maldives are riding a slow but unstoppable freight train straight into the fires of hell underneath Asia where they will be summarily recycled as liquid hot magma and ejected at the nearest convenient volcano, their ashes scattered into the stratosphere. If they look real hard they might notice that the north ends of their islands are sinking just a tad faster then the south. They are gonna have to sue Alfred Wegener. I just wish they would sink faster. Buh Bye.
But in the short term all that construction of hotels and airports might cause them to tip over and capsize anyway :=)
If Kiribati is in such peril, we could club together and buy it. It should be going cheap. We could have a denialists retreat where we can spend all our big oil money.
anote tong may want to pick up a telephone and contact the dutch government. having a significant proportion of your densely populated country below sea level does not appear to be a problem in modern times.
“a publicity stunt,”
Say no more !!!!