Friday, June 4, 2010

Tuvalu - The Defiant Island

In earlier posts (The 35 Errors in “An Inconvenient Truth” - Part 2, Rising Seas - Part 1,Rising Seas - Part 2) I have talked about the plight of the Southern Pacific Nation of Tuvalu. It has been one of the poster children of the pro AGW movement for a very long time but that may come to an end after it was found that the islands were in fact Growing not shrinking due to rising seas. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt investigates in this article: What’s drowning is not Tuvalu but the alarmists.

Remember this great scare, which turned Tuvalu into the poster island of the global warming faith?

More than 75 million people living on Pacific islands will have to relocate by 2050 because of the effects of climate change, Oxfam has warned.

It was a scare whipped up by Al Gore, of course, in his Oscar-winning “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth:

That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand

Tuvalu amped up its victim status, which was its best chance of winning not just foreign aid but permission to settle in Western countries. So it’s Prime Minister in 2003 told the United Nations;

The threat is real and serious, and is of no difference to a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.

Whole institutions were devoted to preaching - especially to children - this scare that poor islanders were being drowned by our emissions:

At an exhibition launched at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum this week, an environment expert, Rob Gell, says it is virtually a foregone conclusion that Tuvalu will be uninhabitable within the next 50 years.

Foregone conclusion is right. Professor Mohammed Dore, an environmental economist from Dore University, couldn’t wait for warming and declared Tuvalu uninhabited already, much to the surprise of its residents:

In fact, there is an island called Tuvalu, which was completely evacuated and New Zealand accepted all the residents because of sea level rising.

All of which culminated in this much-applauded tearful plea at the great warmist gathering at Copenhagen from Tuvalu’s delegate, Ian Fry, who wept for his tiny island country despite actually being an Australian National University student from Queanbeyan, 144km from any beach:



Naturally, Labor bought the scare completely, and in 2006 promised in its “Pacific climate change plan” to take in these “climate change refugees”:

Australia must prepare to take in a new class of environmental refugees from the Pacific if the worst fears of climate change are realised, federal Labor says…

Low-lying Pacific island states such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu - which sit just a few metres above sea level - are at risk of being swamped as global warming forces sea levels to rise.

“We should be part of an international coalition which is prepared to do our fair share,” Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese said.

“The alternative to that is to say, and I don’t think any Australian would accept this, that we’re going to sit by while people literally drown.”

Stop! Hold the scare right there. The farce has gone on long enough.

Here’s the latest study, just in:

Climate scientists have expressed surprise at findings that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.

Islands in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, largely due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment.

The findings, published in the magazine New Scientist, were gathered by comparing changes to 27 Pacific islands over the last 20 to 60 years using historical aerial photos and satellite images.

Auckland University’s Associate Professor Paul Kench, a member of the team of scientists, says the results challenge the view that Pacific islands are sinking due to rising sea levels associated with climate change.

Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, gotten larger,” he said.

UPDATE

As for that terrible sea rise at Tuvalu, the Bureau of Meteorology can’t detect much to panic about from the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project:

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