Pacific islands growing not shrinking, says old study
This time, somebody's noticed
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Huge compensation claims filed by Pacific states including Tuvalu have been hit by a three-year old study, dramatically "rediscovered" by New Scientist magazine today. The study concluded that many Micronesian islands are growing, not shrinking.
“It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown. But they won’t," Professor Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand told the mag.
Kench has been saying us much for a while, but most editors shunned the news.
Kench's study was published in in the journal Global and Planetary Change in November 2007, and last year he told Associated Press that islands apparently rebuild themselves.
Five years ago Pacific islands became a tragic poster children of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. The BBC called the Maldives "a paradise faced with extinction".
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But just four of the 27 islands studied by the team - chosen because sea levels had risen in the past sixty years - had diminished in size. The other 23 had expanded, one by as much as 60 per cent.
The islands apparently expand their mass by accumulating sediment, and through natural processes - not surprisingly, since they're built on live biomatter: coral.
"Perhaps [they] do not need to flee their country," Kench concludes, once again.
Indeed.
There's also another reason for the changes in above-surface mass, but it's one you'll rarely hear from environmental activists, particularly 'climate change' campaigners. Satellite readings show little change in sea levels, and even more so when the cyclical ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) is taken into account. In written evidence to Parliament in 2005, the former president of the INQUA Commission on Seal Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Nils-Axel Mörner, concluded there had been no acceleration in sea level rises, and no net rise since 1970.
Flooding has been experienced on the coral islands, but is a consequence of erosion. The more you neglect your local environment, the more it erodes, and the more flooding you get. The IPCC bases its projections of sea-level rises on computer models.
Bobbing along: Tuvalu's tidal guage 1978-2003
Kench and fellow academic Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used a sea level rise figure of 2mm per decade.
Either way, the ability of the islands to regenerate is welcome. But the political fallout may be huge.
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COMMENTS
To mr.Ralph
Think you should find out which type of islands these are, I do. Yes, do some research, you must.
Yoda aside. Ask yourself what made these islands in the first place. Given the fact that these are not made from geological formations, but they still managed to grow just above sea level, what will prevent it from continuing to do so?
*sigh*
I have absolutely no problems with people taking different sides in a scientific debate, but when you say something like:
"I know these are complex subjects and the author may not grasp it, but I'll try and explain."
and:
"Consequently, it makes absolutely fuck all difference how WIDE the island is to prevent sea-level from inundating it."
and in process contest an associate professor and the magazine New Scientist which have chosen to publish an article about the report, then you better have something major to back it up with. At least I expect you to have a rock solid scientific background, which of course you might have, and have read the report and articles referring to them at least three or four times and checked their references etc. It is simply not enough when all you have to come with are a thesis why something somebody have gone out and actually measured can't possible be true. It really doesn't help when your thesis is based on these islands being of a completely different type than they actually are. When you on top of that are so arrogant about it makes you look like an equus asinus. Did you even read the article in New Scientist?
I am so, like totally, fed up, of people that can't bring an open and inquiring mind, and a civil tone to a scientific debate. It does however help to stoop to their level for a period of time equal to the time it takes to write a response. Yes, take my hat and coat and leave, I will.
Re: What?
"we should not work to eliminate pollution leading to climate change?"
I presume what you mean is that you think CO2 is a pollutant, and that reducing CO2 is the only option here.
We should do whatever harms the fewest people and benefits the most, naturally.
duh
The paper it came from was published in 2004 (it says so), so one can reasonably conclude the research concluded the year before. Or is the obvious inference displeasing to Gaia?
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