By P Gosselin
Because of global warming, tropical paradises are said to be shrinking. In reality, however, most of them are actually GROWING, as extensive long-term studies have shown.
By Wolfgang Kaufmann (Editor. PAZ*)
On 17 October 2009, the then President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, convened a cabinet meeting six meters below the surface of the water not far from the island of Girifushi. Nasheed wanted to use the media-effective spectacle to point out that his country is threatened with flooding should the rise in sea levels due to climate change continues.
Similar fears were subsequently expressed by politicians from other island states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Federation of Micronesia. They referred not least to two warnings by the United Nations in 1989 and 2005, which spoke of the imminent demise of the tropical paradises on the shallow coral islands.
However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has since had to permanently revise its forecasts regarding sea-level rise: After assuming 100 centimeters by 2100 in 1990, only 38 centimeters remained from 2007 onwards.
But even this could be grossly exaggerated: as a long-term study by the Australian oceanographer Simon Holgate showed, the sea level rose by only ten centimeters between 1904 and 1953 and then by only 7.25 centimeters between 1954 and 2003.
“No signs”
But that’s not all: the coral islands have hardly shrunk as a result of the increase, but instead have generally even grown. This is the result of a whole series of studies published between 2010 and January 2023. Most recently, a group of researchers led by geologist Paul Kench of the National University of Singapore reported in the science journal Nature Communications that “recent shoreline changes (±40 meters in 50 years)” on the Maldives island of Kandahalagalaa were “dwarfed by shoreline changes (±200 meters in 100 years) that occurred in the 15 centuries prior”.
This fits with the findings of the team led by Gennadii Donchyts of the Dutch Delft University of Technology in August 2016 in Nature Climate Change: “In the past decades, the atoll islands showed no signs of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. 88.6 per cent of the islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4 per cent shrank. Remarkably, no island of more than ten hectares in extent lost size. These results show that the area stability of atolls and islands is a global trend, regardless of the rate of sea level rise.”
And this in turn corresponds with further observations by New Zealand-born Kench and his colleague Arthur Webb of the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission, based in Suva, the capital of the Republic of Fiji, which the two reported on in the journal Global and Planetary Change in June 2010:
An analysis of aerial photographs of 27 islands in the Pacific that barely rise above sea level has shown that only four of these atolls have decreased in size since 1951. The base area of the others, however, has remained constant or grown.
In the island state of Tuvalu, for example, this affects seven out of nine islets. Even severe natural disasters such as the Christmas tsunami of 2004 or Hurricane Bebe in October 1972 did not reduce the size of the islands. On the contrary: on the Maldives, the tsunami caused a height increase of up to 30 centimeters, while the hurricane increased the size of the main island of Tuvalu, named Fongafale, by ten percent.
“Used only for the subject”
Normally, however, according to Kench and Webb, the island growth resulted from the continuous flushing of ground-up coral fragments from the surrounding reefs, where the corals, as living organisms, constantly produce new material. The reefs thus permanently supply sand that compensates for or even overcompensates for the rise in sea level.
Climate alarmists try to put this remarkable fact into perspective by referring to the alleged death of corals in the South Seas due to rising water temperatures. But the latter is just as much a myth as the demise of the islands due to climate change. For example, the Australian physicist Peter Ridd proved in 2021 that the coral population in the Great Barrier Reef has significantly increased instead of decreasing since 1985. And the mean water temperatures in the area of the 2300-kilometre-long and thus largest reef on earth have not changed since 1871. This is what Bill Johnston, a former employee of the State Environment Department of the Australian state of New South Wales, found out in 2022 when studying old expedition reports.
On the other hand, the Maldives and some other island groups in the Indian Ocean as well as in the Pacific are nevertheless threatened by flooding. Of course, this is not a consequence of allegedly man-made climate change, but of some counterproductive behaviour on the part of the islanders, who like to point the finger at the large industrial nations and accuse them of destroying their livelihoods. As the US marine biologist Bernhard Riegl was able to prove, parrot fish carry large quantities of ground-up coral limestone from the reefs to the beaches. However, these animals are often caught and consumed. Another serious fault is the reckless extraction of building material from the shore area.
That they themselves are responsible for the preservation of the islands and, incidentally, are instrumentalised by the climate lobby, has meanwhile also been recognized by some inhabitants of the atolls in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. One of them is the environmentalist Elisala Pita from Tuvalu:
Her homeland is “only used for the issue of climate change”. The erosion of the coastline on Funafuti, which is often shown in documentaries on European television, is clearly the result of the excessive private construction projects of a local minister.
* Note from EIKE editors :
This essay first appeared in the Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung; 06 April 2023, p.12; EIKE thanks the PAZ editorial staff as well as the author Wolfgang Kaufmann for allowing the unabridged takeover, as with previous articles: https://www.preussische-allgemeine.de/ ; emphasis in the text: EIKE editorial team.
The facts are that anyone who got to any islands in the ocean floated there to begin with.That means they can also float away if necessary. I need not have any concern about island dwellers, they can take care of themselves as already demonstrated.
Warming is like Viagra to these islands and probably peninsulas too.
Most of the pacific population live on major islands rather than atolls. Water supply good volcanic soil -except a few that are limestone and ability to farm properly are the reasons for that.
Atolls have limited farming and fresh water and rely on fishing . Until the modern world means some become micro territories capitals and kaboom, the population explodes from migration and natural increase. they ‘sink’ because sand mining for construction and extraction of water from under the sand means tides encroach further. El nino years means large areas have a raised sea level from prevailing winds too
Has anyone ever asked the activist politicians of Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Federation of Micronesia exactly what they want, from whom, and if their demands are fulfilled, how are these going to improve the lives of the constituents of these islands?
If the West sends money, the activist LEADERS of those islands will open some numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.
A few lives will be greatly enriched. The rest, not so much.
(Does improving the lives of bankers in George Town, Grand Cayman count as helping islanders?)
1) Lots of cash
2) From you and me
3) Their lives will be enriched, there might be some trickle down benefits for their constituents
AGW 101 = identify a minority, tell them CC is threatening their life, tell the world that Capitalism is causing CC, promise those minorities $$ for the damage (that hasn’t and won’t be realized), demonize the West as the cause. Free money, who would say no?
Absolutely. And form a nice orderly queue to sign up to the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Let’s hope they are all overjoyed at the great prospect of being Chinese colonies. Obviously better than those nasty white folk from Britain.
Charles Darwin, 1839: Voyage of HMS Beagle. Required reading in a lot of geology courses, now we know why.
Darwin was proven right that atolls were based on submerged volcanic islands. As long as the corals can grow faster than sea level rise, the island is stable or growing.
Yes
Darwin came his theories about coral reefs in a round about way as he knew about the prevailing geology explanation
‘In his chapter on coral reefs in the second volume of the Principles of Geology, Lyell had adopted the prevailing view of the time that ‘lagoon islands’ (the annular reefs that we now call atolls) were ‘nothing more than the crests of submarine volcanoes, having the rims and bottoms of their craters overgrown by corals’
Darwin’s hand-coloured cross-sectional view of the reef at Cocos (Keeling) atoll
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/commentary/geology/darwin-coral-reefs
If Islands are sinking that is nothing to do with melting ice and sea level rise (in which case would be flooding), it is to do with tectonic plates subduction
Question. If the islands are rising from sand deposits on the beach, wouldn’t that mean the centers are not rising? In relation to sea level? Where are the measurements being taken.
These islands grow in large.
On some of these sinking islands, new hotels appear, an new airport is built, seems, they are waiting for climate tourist….
Would it be fair to say that the islands are growing because we’re feeding them?
= a variation on ‘CO2 induced Global Greening’
Such thing is complete garbage. Yes there may be Global Greening ## but it is what ‘most everyone would call ‘pollution’ that is causing it – and Has To Be Stopped.
Once that climate junk science and wilful ignorance have misunderstood what’s really happening.
Ocean-going plastic and its metabolites are what’s making the islands grow.
Hence I present as evidence of the ongoing global insanity a picture of what was stuffed through my letterbox a few days ago.
What you see is the inside of the carton that a bowel cancer test-kit arrived in.
(Once you get past a certain age in the UK, the national health service send these to you. You place a little sample in a plastic test tube and return it to them for testing)
But just ‘get’ what’s inside the carton = ‘prevented ocean plastic’
Apart from the hideously awkward grammar what do you say?
## I went searching for a refresher on Albedo values recently. What I found was insane and ugly.
(All the numbers I remembered from barely 3 years ago had changed. I’ll search some more then tell you what I find.)
But but but, I sussed Global Greening.
Global Greening is caused by de-forestation. It is because native/wild forest has lower Albedo that what replaces it = farmland growing grassland, esp annual grasses.
i.e. When the Sputnik reports, causing NASA to jump the shark, about changes in “fluorescence and leaf” area, what it’s seeing is the higher density of leaves of grasses, their different shapes and that they are a different shade of green. While having higher Albedo.
It’s as simple as that.
An easy mistake to make but when you’re as ‘simple’ as NASA is nowadays, what else to expect
Nice work.
But if they grow too fast on one side they could tip over!
Dr Bill Johnston is mentioned for his study of sea temperature measurements along the Great Barrier Reef in a scientific expedition dated 1871. In summary, he found that measured temperatures in 1871 were the same as those mentioned today. See his full study on his blog named Bomwatch.
Dr Johnston tried to have his work published in the normal scientific manner. No success, blocked by gatekeepers.
So, we have two problems crying for correction. No warming. Gatekeepers.
The current trendy approach to problems is to go quiet. Ignorance is Bliss. Science, that has been so vital to our social progress, is now being actively denigrated by ignorance.
Geoff S
“On 17 October 2009, the then President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, convened a cabinet meeting six meters below the surface of the water … ”
I recall that not long after that they spent several billion to develop some seaside resorts.
There is no shortage of luxury tourist resorts in the Maldives.
I was recently researching for an article on the battle for Kwajalein Atoll in the Western Pacific, part of the Marshall Islands group; specifically two islands, Roi and Namur on the northern point of the atoll. In 1944 these were two separate islands joined by a narrow sand bar, today they are one island as the channel between them has completely infilled with sand, so definitely not shrinking!
Just you wait til climate change gets the predator crabs and then the COTS gobble up the coral islands-
People were ‘really emotional’ when corals were initially being destroyed by starfish (msn.com)
If only the doomsters could get Ridd of the thorn in their side.
I think this essay by Willis from 2010 is a brilliant explanation of how coral islands work
Floating Islands – Watts Up With That?