Climate Change Victims: First Them, Then Us
Here’s a story about a town that has all but vanished due to climate change. Of course, many people, when they see how remote the village is and how foreign its people are to our more “civilized” ways, will discount this story as irrelevant. I’m not sure we’ll feel the same way when we start talking about Boston and Miami.
Even before Boston and Miami are affected by rising sea levels, an enormous climate refugee problem may awaken them.
Very true. For the sake of brevity, I omitted a few steps along the way. 🙂
Graig,
One of the popular misinterpretations about climate change science is the vulnerability of islands and coastlines to “climate change”.
Coastlines have always been moving, rising and falling, expanding and contracting. New islands are created while others shrink or disappear. Catastrophic weather events have always occurred, and moved from location to location for reasons not fully understood.
In the past these events went either unnoticed or unremarked because the human population was much smaller and the mass media didn’t exist. There are towns in the UK that were once built as ports, and over the centuries now find themselves many miles from the ocean.
Not all these events are created by industrial climate-change.
There is also considerable debate about the best method of assessing Oceanic level rises and the effects on islands and coastlines.
As the authors of the report, ‘Sea-Level Trend Analysis for Coastal Management’ by A. Parker, M. Saad Saleem,M.
Lawson and J.R. Hunter, highlighted :
1) The network of tide gauges provides the only information of value for costal planning
2) The worldwide naïve average of sea level is +0.24 mm/year with no acceleration.
3) Climate models have crucial flaws making them useless.
4) Planning schemes must only reflect the proven local and global historical data.
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569116300205]
Some islands in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans display great resilience to rising sea levels,actually gaining height and size while others are sinking due to reasons unrelated to sea levels.
It’s a great mistake to interpret every natural geographical change through the prism of “climate change”, or a desire to castigate modern civilizations in favour of a romanticized view of the virtues of less developed societies.
This following is an extract from an article in the WSJ. This article caused a torrent of outrage from climate extremists labeling he author a “denier” and heretic. (this was the first occasion a corrupt cabal of climate advocates and activists demanded those expressing skeptical views on environmental issues should be subject to criminal sanctions).
:-
” During Hurricane Sandy, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island absorbed a critical part of the storm surge. Its hills and waterways spared nearby neighborhoods like Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights much worse flooding. The 2,200-acre site, which closed a decade ago and is being turned into a park, was also temporarily reopened as a transfer station, helping officials and relief agencies clear debris from around the city.
If many New Yorkers, Staten Islanders included, still can’t help thinking of the place as a mountain range of stinking trash, that’s understandable. But since its closing, Fresh Kills has become a model for landfill reclamation around the world, having been transformed into a vast green space full of wildlife. Now it is also demonstrating the role of wetland buffers in battling rising waters.”
It could be that man made efforts to prevent erosion, could be counter-productive to some island nations, especially in the Pacific.
Paul Kench a New Zealand coastal geomorphologist from the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, in conjunction with many of his peers in Australia, UK, India, Singapore, and France has released the finding of a 20 year study, which found:
“Reef islands change shape and move around in response to shifting sediments, and that many of them are growing in size, not shrinking, as sea level inches upward. The implication is that many islands especially less developed ones with few permanent structures may cope with rising seas well into the next century.
But for areas transformed by human development, such as the capitals of Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Maldives, the future is considerably gloomier. Largely because many structures, seawalls, roads, water and electricity systems are locked in place.
Analysis of more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, indicates that about 80 percent of the islands have remained stable or increased in size (roughly 40 percent in each category). Only 20 percent have shown the net reduction that’s widely assumed to be a typical island’s fate when sea level rises.
Some islands grew by as much as 14 acres (5.6 hectares) in a single decade, and Tuvalu’s main atoll, Funafuti, 33 islands distributed around the rim of a large lagoon—has gained 75 acres (32 hectares) of land during the past 115 years”.
Obviously, one of the problems for island nations, is human occupation. An aerial view of the Maldives shows an astonishing expansion in building, and rapidly increasing population interfering with the natural process of island ecology. But then that’s a world wide problem.
In the past, overcrowding or lack of resources forced the Polynesians to set sail to discover and occupy new islands. Unfortunately, the modern world, especially foreign aid programs encourage development on the home islands. Unfortunately, this impacts on the island’s ecology.
As we gain more understanding, we may be able to develop new technologies compatible with basic ecology.
That’s really the point of my post, it’s all to easy to interpret every problem through the prism of “climate change”, and thereby misdiagnose the real issues.
The idea that “Climate models have crucial flaws making them useless” is one that lives on the outer banks of the remotest fringe of science.
Craig,
I think you read the statement “Climate models have crucial flaws making them useless”, out of context.
The authors were referring to the difficulties in relying on broad based models when attempting calculate specific geophysical phenomenon such as coastal erosion etc. The report explains in some detail why “climate Change modelling” can create inappropriate and even misleading measures when used in this particular application., without reference to other data.
I haven’t heard of any serious challenges to this body of scientific research. The research is very mainstream, peer reviewed and not considered particularly controversial, except by the most fanatical of alarmist advocates.
“Climate Change Modelling ” can never be completely accurate in all aspects. the modelling relies on collected data, some of which is very accurate, others less so. Many important factors not yet even be realized. Scientific knowledge is continuously expanding and changing. Those who believe today’s knowledge is set in stone, and any challenge is “heresy” , have rejected science in favour of dogma !
It’s very important to keep an open mind.
Please see: http://www.2greenenergy.com/2016/03/08/how-certain-are-we-of-climate-change/.