An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. This fascinating fact of a 369.67 square kilometre increase has recently been discovered by a group of Chinese scientists analysing both surface and satellite records. Overall, land was lost during the 1990s, but the scientists found that in the study period of three decades to 2020 there was a net increase of 157.21 km2. The study observed considerable natural variation in both erosion and accretion. Of course, the findings blow holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. By means of such flimsy scare tactics, as we have seen in many other cases, desperate attempts are made to terrify global populations to accept the insanity of the Net Zero collectivisation.
The scientists said their data suggested that sea-level rise has not been a widespread cause of erosion for island shorelines in the studied regions. “Presently, it is considered one of the contributing factors to shoreline erosion but not the predominant one,” they explained. Needless to say, none of this will detain the attention of climate hysterics in both mainstream media and politics. The Guardian was in fine form last June stating that rising oceans will extinguish more than land. “It will kill entire languages,” it added, noting the effect on Pacific islands such as Tuvalu. Those areas of the Earth that were most hospitable to people and languages are now becoming the “least hospitable”.
Silly emotional Guardianista guff of course, but happily it does not seem to apply to Tuvalu. A recent study found that the 101 islands of Tuvalu had grown in land mass by 2.9%. The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average”.
The Maldives is also a poster scare for rising sea levels, with the attention-seeking activist Mark Lynas – he of the nonsense claim that 99.9% of scientists agree humans cause all or most climate change – organising an underwater Cabinet meeting of the local Government in 2009. As it happens, the Maldives is one of a number of areas that have seen recent increases in land mass. Other areas include the Indonesian Archipelago, islands along the Indochinese Peninsula coast, and islands in the Red and Mediterranean Seas. Notably, the coastal waters of the Indochinese Peninsula had the most substantial gain, with an increase of 106.28 km2 over the 30-year period. Of the 13,000 islands examined, the researchers found that only around 12% had experienced a significant shoreline shift, with almost equal numbers experiencing either landward (loss) or seaward (gain) movement.
The scientists identify many reasons why islands can grow in size despite the small annual rises in sea level seen in many parts of the world. It is noted that island shorelines are constantly changing due to factors such tides, winds, nearshore hydrodynamics and the transport of sediment. On inhabited islands, human action such as fish farming and land reclamation can be important.
Of course, humans action can have a number of unintended consequences, notably the mining of coral and the breakdown of natural water barriers. Island states such as the Maldives have not been slow in coming forward to claim ‘climate reparations’ from guilt-tripped citizens in the developed world. But tourism has dramatically boosted income in the Maldives to first world levels at a time when the locals have mined coral in industrial quantities to build ports, airports and resort developments. In the process, ocean life diversity has been lost and the islands are often less protected from storm waves that can flow direct to the shoreline. In a recent essay, a group of scientists and economists charged that coral mining “has resulted in massive degradation of shallow reef-flat areas, with important negative impacts on coastal protection”.
The Chinese findings are important in helping destroy the claim that many low-lying islands will simply disappear beneath the waves in the near future due to human-induced climate change. They show how shoreline changes are a persistent and ongoing process that is subject to many natural and human influences. Most of the poster islands used for climate scares such as Tuvalu and the Maldives have increased in size of late, and are hardly suitable to whip up fear of a claimed climate ‘emergency’. Sea level rise is not a “predominant” cause of the changing coasts, the scientists note.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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An apocryphal story:
In a wood, somewhere dull. It’s raining……
Unknown soldier on radio: ‘I’m p*ssed off’
5 minutes pass
Unknown soldier on radio again: ‘I’m really, really p*ssed off’
Commander on radio: ‘Unknown station, say again callsign!’
Unknown soldier on radio: ‘I’m not that fecking p*ssed off!’
And why is everyone p*ssed off?
Mainly because of this mind numbing nut zero b*llocks based on utter nonsense!
And the conservative party is going to pay a mighty price for this drivel (and for, generally, being a bunch of complete nincompoops)…….
Apropos of your tale, I heard the same story attributed a co-pilot on the intercom to ATC (Air Traffic Control). Apocryphal too. Nevertheless a short true story–since I was on the flight deck at the time. In the RAF VC-10 aircraft en route to/from RAF Gan (Maldives) radio contact would be maintained with Indian ATC whist we flew several hours over water (Indian Ocean). The HF (high frequency) radio was notoriously fickle and prone to weather interference with many a time, the co-pilot finding himself having raise his voice to be heard and replied to by a heavily accented ATC controller on the ground in Bombay. One night, following much frustration and unacknowledged calls, the co-pilot was heard by the flight deck shouting at the top of his lungs, “Bombay, Bombay, fucking Bombay. This is Ascot two-zero-zero-two. Do you read?–Over.” He’d deliberately not pressed the ‘transmit button’, so the message never went out. Me and the Captain howled with laughter.
Actually does happen. This was a favourite when I was in. We were all supposed to be on radio silence.
Call Sign 1: Are there any friendly bears out there?
CS2: Send CS.
CS1: Repeats first phrase.
CS2: Loses it and rants over the air.
CS1: You’re not a very friendly bear, are you?
CS2: Spends 5 minutes lecturing everyone about security and brevity. Thus breaking the rules about keeping all transmissions short. (Under 11 seconds to prevent DF by the enemy)
DF is direction finding. Get enough directions from different DF stations and they have triangulated your position and drop a big BOOM in your lap. Wise people do not rise to the bait and the bored soldier gets too bored to carry on.
In the early 70s, I landed at RAF Gan the southernmost Maldive island (00.41 minutes South) around thirty times. The last time I was there just pre the RAF pullout 50 years ago, it was listed as being 6ft AMSL (Above Mean Sea Level).. It was a main staging post en route to Singapore and Hong Kong. Checking today’s charts, it’s still 6ft AMSL.
Don’t take my word for it?–Jeff Bezos has just purchased his third property in Indian Creek, Florida, aka ‘Billionaires Bunker’ for a cool $90,000,000. It’s 3 metres (10ft) AMSL.
Money talks.
It is tyime we called climate alarmists what they really are.
Liars!
Athletes in France during the Olympics to be denied aircon because ‘climate change’, but what the heck is a ”geothermal cooling system”?
”Thousands of athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will have to make do without air conditioning as the organisers have decided not to install ACs at the athletes’ village as part of their initiative to combat global warming. Rather than having air conditioning, a geothermal cooling system will be used to maintain the temperature of the apartments, where 10,500 Olympians and 4,400 Paralympians will stay.
“We designed these buildings so that they would be comfortable places to live in in the summer, in 2024 and later on, and we don’t need air conditioning in these buildings because we oriented the facades so that they wouldn’t get too much sun during the summer, and the facades, the insulation is really efficient,” said Yann Krysinski, who is directing the service of infrastructure for the Games.
A scientist by the name of Mark Nelson took to X to question the French government’s choice to deny the athletes access to even a basic comfort like air conditioning in an effort to “combat climate change,” particularly in light of the country’s nearly carbon-free electricity.
He pointed out how France has excess electricity and its system is almost entirely carbon neutral. In fact, the country has so much extra electricity that in the summer, it even shuts down its nuclear reactors. “Yet it appears they’re intentionally underpowering cooling for athletes to make a fake environmental statement,” Mark Nelson lamented.”
https://www.opindia.com/2024/04/2024-paris-olympics-no-air-conditioning-for-athletes-as-country-wants-to-combat-global-warming/
All along the promenade in a town near me (Kirkcaldy) the planners have decided it was a good idea to have a great big long row of what looks like Yucca plants, or palms of some kind. ——-Are you kidding me?——- For 6 or 7 months of the year it is lashing with rain and wind, or it is bloody freezing cold. I always make the joke that the Scots are dour, and we all sound a bit like Andy Murray, because of the bloody weather. _(Sorry Andy, you were a great player). ——-So why put palms all along the prom in Kirkcaldy? ——–You can almost see the dimwits sitting around a table up in the townhouse thinking that palms are a great forward thinking idea because after all everything is getting warmer because of climate change right? —-I passed by yesterday and I have never seen such a bedraggled sorry looking pitiful bunch of tropical plants in my life. ——-Dear Council, Kirkcaldy is not the tropics and is not going to ever be the tropics.
About, oh, 5 years ago, a professional gardener told me in all seriousness that in 5 years time, the only tree that would be surviving in climate change-ridden England was the eucalyptus…
professional gardener?
There was a proposal to set up an area, in the UK, like an arboretum, to study the effects of Climate Change on various trees. Obviously lacking in any observational powers and general knowledge they seemed to have not noticed that the UK already has the largest variety of mature trees from all over the world in places like Kew Gardens, Inverewe (sub tropical) Gardens, any south coast sea side town and in many private gardens, etc, etc…
Of course there would be no grant money if one just went at looked at any number of exotic trees that have been planted here, perhaps in deliberately specific places, and are thriving. Life is not fragile, but determined. Consider the tropical parrots that are thriving in London.
However, I don’t think Kirkcaldy is the same as Torquay.
What the “Geothermal cooling system” could be – if I am right.
There are three types of heat pump: air/air; air/water; air/ground. The first is usual for air-con by recirculating interior air and cooling it in a heat exchanger outside (the same as a fridge) and is least efficient; the second is the one mostly promoted for central heating by extracting heat from outside air and heating water from CH in a heat exchanger and is efficient.
The most efficient, and most expensive to install, is to put the heat exchanger underground below a depth of 1 metre. Either heat can be extracted from the sub-terrain to serve a CH system, or heat can be dissipated underground to cool an air conditioning system.
The air-con can be in the form of cold water radiators.
In other words, the geothermal cooling system is a heat pump in reverse using the sub-terrain instead of outside air.
So air-conditioning using a different method.
However: energy cannot be created nor destroyed, so energy will be needed to send water/air through a heat exchanger underground.
As with everything to do with ‘environmentalism’ and particularly Net Zero, what is says on the label is not what is inside the box.
I’m a layman not a physicist but I agree yours is the most plausible interpretation.
Geothermal sounds so ‘green’ and virtuous. That’s PR/branding for you
Snake Oil. Carpetbaggers. Frauds.
France does have significant non organic fuel generation of electricity, however as with most band wagon climate extremist nations, they stubbornly hold to the suicide pact of total net zero carbon, which besides being totally unnecessary and economically unfeasible, is scientifically impossible. Unless of course their end goal is to drop CO2 levels faster than what is currently happening naturally, 425 ppm, to levels, below 200 ppm, at which plant life cannot be sustained and all life on earth perishes? They have dropped emissions by 25% of 1990 levels and have legislated 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Interesting that China’s goal for total world domination is set for 2049. So their virtue signalling Olympic air conditioning sacrifice seems likely aimed at furthering the continuing suicidal CO2 reduction!
I am trying to think of some area or field where we are told things time and time again that never come to pass and yet people still refuse to question any of it. —–OK I know people on this website do. But among the general population there is a remarkable reluctance. I think a lot of it has to do with being busy with work and family life and assuming that if something is on the 6’Oclock news than it somehow must be true, or at least fairly true. People are also reluctant to question what they think is “science”. They feel that arguing with scientists will get them nowhere because the scientist knows more than them. In any case why argue with scientists who are simply studying the world and discovering TRUTH? —-But that is the first mistake that people make.———– Climate Change is not about scientists running around all day in white coats with barely time for a cheese roll, and then running to the government with their findings. It is the OTHER WAY AROUND. —-The government runs to the scientists for the excuses for their policies. Funding for climate change and things associated with it have increased 30 fold and more. There are people everywhere now receiving government funding for supposedly studies about “climate change” that had no interest whatsoever in the subject of climate before. But as someone once pointed out “if you pay someone money to look for a purple horse, they won’t be in too big a hurry to say they can’t find any”
A religious cult. The unholy church of ‘The Science’. Never question ‘the Science’. If you want the sheeple to obey just invoke the gospel of ‘The Science’ and magic words, like consensus, experts, research, data models etc.
wink——-Yet thinking back hundreds of years “science” was the thing that threatened authority. —–The authority of the Church. —-But today “Science” is King and everyone that doesn’t believe in the “Science” is a heretic.
I look forward to the BBC reporting on this very good news
“Climate Change” is the method being used to install a One World Government:
Off Guardian:
https://off-guardian.org/2024/01/01/2024-the-year-global-government-takes-shape/
All I ask is that you all read and understand the paper Chris links to. Things are not so simple as he makes out.
You’re correct that it’s not as clear cut as Chris suggests, but the paper’s conclusions don’t support the alarmists’ views either. Some gain, some lose, but more gained than lost. Nothing definitive.
The paper does undermine itself by referring to the IPCC, which I hold to be politically tainted.
The study is based on a combination of automated image analysis (The accuracy of our shoreline extraction process is evidenced by an average positional error of 11.24 meters and a standard deviation of 22.54 meters). This requires manual assessment/confirmation of the high water line, resulting in data adjustments. Then some calculations (which I don’t claim to understand) are performed.
The amount of tinkering required concerns me.
Agreed. It is an interesting contribution to assessing the various forces affecting land size including, but not limited to, sea level rise. It is by no means definitive (and doesn’t pretend to be).
As the sea rises and falls twice a day through tides, the high water line is the normal point of measurement. Of course this can also change due to plate tectonics, also land is taken by the sea and given up elsewhere. All of these things make it devilishly difficult to have a fixed point in space that is ‘sea level’ and comparisons to times recent and ancient. What should be clear is that if the sea level were to rise 1m in the Maldives, it would rise all over the world, unless by other outside factors. Declaring a fractional movement, as anything other than ‘Yes, it does that’ is scientific expert over-reach.
Aren’t you glad you have the Free Speech on the Daily Sceptic to be able to “err on the side of alarmism” like you do?——–The BBC certainly doesn’t believe in free speech on this issue despite the fact that it is all of us that pay for it. Most of the other mainstream channels don’t either and there are those who would lock people up for daring to question something that is allegedly about “science”. ——-But I put it to you that when you cannot question “science” it isn’t really science we are dealing with. ——So I hope you enjoy your free speech and your personal opinion being allowed on the Daily Sceptic.
Willis Eschenbach wrote a great explanation of sea levels and coral attols back in 2010: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
AS an aside, one of the commenters quotes Franci Bacon from 1620:
“Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own.”
Hey Greta et al….. HOW DARE YOU!
Funny this sea level rise story. It cannot be possible for the sea level to rise much, lets see why:
There are two ways in which the sea can rise, either thermal expansion, or more water. The entire of oil so far extracted, ever, is probably a couple of cubic miles, so not a lot. This might produce a couple of cubic miles of water, so not a lot compared with the approximately 10 to the power 11 square miles of the oceans, in fact rather less than a millimeter. Maybe we have extracted more oil than that, so perhaps a 100 cubic miles so maybe 50mm rise.
Then we come to the Arctic melting, this makes zero difference as all the ice is floating so already displacing the water (simple physics!). The Antarctic total volume seems pretty stable, so no change there, if anything it is growing slightly.
We have burnt a lot of coal too, perhaps enough to raise another 50mm. So sea level rise of meters is impossible, whatever happens to the temperature!
The numbers are simple estimates so may be somewhat incorrect, but I am sure you can see the jist. It is scientific claptrap to warn of the end from sea level rise, but you knew that anyway!
I remember a news report a year or so ago when an islands’ boss man was standing in 2 foot of water explaining how his island was being ravaged by sea water level rise. He completely forgot to mention the 3% increase in land mass of the island but then that’s not the Narrative.
A BBC news (Narrative) report the other day claimed that hundreds of years of natural erosion on the UK East Coast was caused by climate change. Misinformation or what? This is why I ignore the BBC and I apologise to myself each time I accidentally catch their “news”.