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
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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
“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…… says he had assumed that a rising ocean would engulf the islands…. “That’s what everyone thought, and nobody questioned it,””
Lord give me strength. Another “discovery” of what has been known for more than a century. Didn’t Darwin even remark on this. So Kench teams up with an Aussie geomorph guy, drills a hole… Didn’t he know the US drilled holes in Bikini Atoll before testing the A-bomb there and found over a hundred metres of this very growth record, right from the end of the last glacial period? What do these guys study in geomorphology these days!!! Lots of geologists questioned “it” but who would listen?
I AM PREDICTING THAT ANOTHER GEOMORPHOLOGIST WILL DISCOVER THAT RIVER DELTAS ALSO RISE WITH SEA LEVEL RISE AND ARE ERODED DOWN WITH SEA LEVEL DROP. The next Nobelists will be an even bigger joke than they are now.
T Control says:
August 1, 2014 at 8:30 am
It’s funny how Darwin has basically become a cult hero for atheists/academics who like to feel superior to those dumb creationist conservatives. … /snipped/ … I totally BELIEVE in evolution, and Darwin is truly one of my heroes, I just hate these hypocrites. [ the all-caps are my emphasis – UM]
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The difference is you feel the need to believe in something, whereas a ‘non-believer’ just assesses evidence. Evidence for some joker pulling-off the (alleged) Lazarus trick is rather scant, non-testable and non-repeatable. So a psychosomatic belief reflex does not paper over the fact of this stark lack of observation and repeatability.
Please get your head around this, it’s really straight forward; The people you flame are not interested in Christianity at all, or in ‘disproving’ of it. Like all things it stands of falls on its merit.
All that has happened is the people you wish to paint as wanting to feel ‘superior’, have long ago moved on (centuries ago), and do not recognize a belief as a pertinent consideration or input for understanding.
No one cares what you believe, whether in excess loaves and fishes, or in evolution. Why would one even state a personal belief in evolution, when it’s equivalent to putting up your hand and declaring unmitigated bias, and that your mind is made-up on a subject? Any subject.
That’s not what natural inquiry is (now formalised and often stupidly labelled “doing science”), observation and testing teaches, whereas belief is its anti-thesis and a source of derailment and blockage to understanding a thing. We came to an understanding of fetus gestation and birth via paying attention via first ignoring the widespread belief that it was an unfathomable miracle. Well, it certainly is miraculous, but we have moved well past mere beliefs about it.
Darwin also did not ‘believe’ in evolution, he pointed out that the conception was consistent with observation and it could be tested (i.e. different to Lazarus and his alleged reviver emerging from a tomb, after they “stinketh”).
You also lumped atheists and academics together and insinuate they are in the same cohort, and in the same clique as those involved in natural inquiry, but these are very different things. Being an academic refers to an accredited professional vocation.
And what you will find is that most people who you lightly label ‘atheists’, would not call themselves an atheist at all, most would not even care to call themselves anything, except maybe a human being engaged in natural inquiry.
The fact that process may result in disregard for theism, in general, is incidental and not something anyone cares about. Theism is about as relevant as a preoccupation with barbie dolls, or stamp collecting, or the various culturally jaundiced versions of history.
Mr. T, the world moved on, we don’t care about what you’re getting in a twist about, we care about understanding what we are, what we’re in, and mostly marvelling at it and moving beyond false conceptions and historical and cultural baggage and fear mongering that impedes the brain from weeding out fake notions and freeing itself to take a constant fresh look at everything, and also at what we believe we know, but in fact don’t know.
Take a mental laxative, relax, be at peace, there’s no enemy hobgoblin here, set on attacking you, nor anyone else. 😉
Gary Pearse says:
August 2, 2014 at 9:59 am
I am predicting that another geomorphologist will discover that river deltas also rise with sea level rise and are eroded down with sea level drop.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothems
I’d say almost every geo in the South Pacific who had any understanding of geodetics and structural geology would have immediately been questioning the ludicrous suggestion the occasionally, seasonally and locally higher tides of Kiribati equated to global cAGW induced sea level rising.
Not the journal ‘Nature’ (and others) though, they did not want to know what geology had to say, as they were too busy with, “doing science” and such blithering rot.
It is really historically staggering and one hell of a barrage of rank cheek for the media for years on end to rush to listen to the ultimate in walking talking utter morons (by now you have detected that I speak of Bob brown, Sarah Hansen-Young, Christine Milne, Penny Wong and fellow travelers) and who repeatedly accused ‘deniers’ of “ignoring the science”, when a goodly portion of the ‘deniers’ were in fact the majority of Geologists (from the Latin: “The study earth”) who are just pointing out the physical fact that geodetic scientific measurement shows conclusively that Kiribati is not sinking due to sea level rises, but due to prosaic geodynamic mechanisms that overwhelmingly dominate the Pacific ring-of-fire and associated volcanic island chains in these areas.
And were shouted down as ‘deniers’ or cranks or some other label, for about the last 27 years!
The inexcusable level of cognitive discombobulation within the media, (and its proprietors) and this greenish diatribe has broken historical record maximums for the amount of unadulterated b_____!t allocated to preserving and continually trying to resuscitate a most pathetic and irrational conclusion.
Earth weeps to be one day be heard above the cacophony of green ‘saviors’.
When you deliberately concoct false intelligence as a pretext to unfounded actions, an are caught out doing it, suddenly no one regards your intelligence estimates as worth a bag full of cAGW hot air.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11166377
From the same School of Environment at Auckland University, Chris DeFreitas writes
There is some inundation evident on many atolls, which can be confused with sea level rise. It is the result of erosion, sand mining and construction projects causing an inflow of sea water. Other factors are also involved.
Excessive use of freshwater for irrigation causes destruction of natural underground freshwater reservoirs. A consequence is seawater encroachment into vegetable growing pits, but is not the result of sea level rise.
Part of the problem is related also to the paving of the roads and land development. The effect has been to reduce infiltration of rainwater into the subsurface freshwater lens, which is the water supply source for the islanders. When this increased runoff is combined with a high tide, flooding along the coast makes it look like the sea level is rising.
Rolf, on his own evidence, was not in Kiribati. Funafuti is the capital of Tuvalu, a completely separate country from Kiribati. While both countries were part of the former Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, the indigenous peoples in the colony – Polynesians in the Ellice Islands, and Micronesians in the Gilberts – decided in the 1970s to become independent as separate entities. So the Ellice islands were renamed as Tuvalu, and the Gilberts became Kiribati.
Incidentally, a decade ago I spent three years living in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, and saw little or no evidence of sea-level rise – but encountered plenty of evidence of the problems deriving both from population pressure on the finite fresh water lens, and from coastal erosion as a result of unregulated construction of seawalls. Virtually all of the land and water problems in Kiribati result from local action and events, not from any global causation. In particular, problems with water supply are a simple consequence of population pressure causing water to be drawn from the fresh water lens at a rate faster than its replenishment by rainfall. Claims of rising sea levels are irrelevant.
(I lived on the ocean reef side, and “my” beach was initially deeply eroded as a consequence of a major reclamation that had been made on the neighbouring property – the beach was restored when the reclamation was removed following a change of heart on the part of the leaseholder.)