Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wake me up when the Maldives really sink- and not before

We have been hearing for quite a number of years now that the Maldives islands are sinking due to rising sea levels caused by the AGW(Anthropogenic Global Warming). In fact it is a wonder that they have not gone into the sea yet- what are they waiting for?

This is a typical piece of reporting on the issue-
With half of its islands eroding at an alarming rate due to rising sea-level caused by global warming, Maldives has sought India's help to save it from being swamped by the ocean.

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The threat of disappearance looms large over Maldives with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projecting sea level to rise between 9 and 88 centimetres (3.5 and 35 inches) by the year 2100.

The IPCC report said if the higher end of that scale is reached, the sea could overflow the heavily populated coastlines of countries like Bangladesh while island state of the Maldives might disappear.

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On the other hand there is this-

But is the Maldives really about to be flooded because of climate change? Not according to a project conducted by Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University:

THE Maldives have a unique position in sea-level research. In the past decade they have attracted special attention because, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenario, the Maldives would be condemned to become flooded in the next 50 to 100 years.

Our research data does not lend support to any such flooding scenario, however. On the contrary, we find no signs of any ongoing sea-level rise. Our results comes from visits to numerous islands ... and includes coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating.

Present sea level was reached about 4500BC. In the past 4000 years, sea level oscillated around the present. In the past decade, there are no signs of any rise in sea level. Hence, we are able to free the islands from the condemnation to become flooded in the 21st century.


So what is going on?

Don't disturb me with another hysterical report about the Maldives sinking.Wake me up only when something actual happens on the ground -or in the sea.

2 comments:

hannan said...

hehe. I am a Maldivian. Well I don't think we would be sunk by the end of teh century. This is just another way of talking rubbish. But its better to have a contingency approach to this; to the worst case scenario.




Original comment date- 2008-11-13. See here- http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/drudgery-of-importing-haloscan-comments.html

Chris Schoneveld said...

This is a copy of my letter to the International Herald Tribune and published on Sepember 12 2008:

A self-inflicted problem

In "Climate change: With millions under threat, inaction is unethical" (Views, Sept. 10) the president of the Maldives, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, contends that the Maldives are threatened by climate change, yet he fails to acknowledge that coral islands have survived during a rise in sea levels of 120 meters since the last ice age.

Under natural conditions, coral is perfectly able to grow upwards, keeping pace with any relative rise in sea levels.

If someone has to be blamed for the eventual demise of any of the Pacific or Indian Ocean coral islands, it is the inhabitants themselves. They are the ones who are destroying the natural coral habitat by creating roads and buildings, allowing bad fishing practices and many forms of pollution. With dead coral, these islands have no natural mechanism to keep them above water. The inconvenient truth is that these islands are not sustainable under permanent human inhabitation.

Chris Schoneveld, Eysus, France





Original comment date- 2008-11-13. See here- http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/drudgery-of-importing-haloscan-comments.html