The Maldives, the Marshalls, and Kiribati haven’t gone underwater despite your claim, the Carteret islands are sinking rather than the sea rising, and the cite from India involves a shifting, sedimentary island in the Sundarbans, where island disappearances are a all-too-common occurrence, and the disappearance in question occurred years ago.
Look, EJsGirl, I think it’s a wonderful testament to the power of the internet that it only took you half a minute to come up with useless propaganda like that … but next time, take a half a day and do some serious research. Among many other things your half minute of research missed is that, as Charles Darwin discovered, coral atolls (such as Marshalls, Tuvalu, and Kiribati) go up and down with the sea level, they have survived hundreds of feet of sea level rise in the past, and thus they are in no danger at all from changing sea level heights …
w.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deeply, or taste not the Pierian Spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
None of it really matters, however. The US is the only industrialized nation to not sign on to Kyoto, Bush admitted that the US was going to have to do something about climate change in his last State of the Union address, Europe is seriously considering slapping a carbon tax on US imports, if the US doesn’t get serious about cutting it’s greenhouse gas emissions, the residents of Tuvalu are all looking to move off their islands before they disappear beneath the waves, the North Pole is estimated to be ice free by summer 2013, and no matter what, some people will remain convinced that it’s all a grand conspiracy by scientists, who are somehow better at keeping secrets and manipulating people than is the Bush Administration when it comes to things like Iraq and Gitmo. Fortunately, however, the people who think it’s a conspiracy don’t set public policy.
But, hey, they can take comfort that before the next decade’s out, China will be the largest pollutor on the planet.
For what it’s worth, the U.S. didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty because it knew the treaty was useless. As shown in later years, when studies showed the countries who DID sign the treaty didn’t have a chance in hell of meeting the treaty requirements.
Of course, the treaty didn’t impose any emissions limits on many of its signatories, most notably China and India. So I would imagine that China and India were able to meet the treaty requirements.
You must be joking. The joke being of course that not only were the coral atolls healthy enough to rebuild themselves (and thus the islands) higher with the rising water level, but also had the luxury of millenia or more to do so.
There very well might be healthy coral in some places of the world, but I doubt that their ability to build up an island several orders of magnitude faster than they ever did before has been proven.
In addition, this sort of harkens to the old canard that just because “mother nature will provide for herself”, and “the EARTH doesn’t need saving,” even IF the islands themselves survive several hundred feet of rising water, human built structures will not (unless the islands float like a preschooler’s conception of them!)
Ludovic, thanks for your post. Having lived up close and personal with coral reefs for a number of years, I can assure you that corals grow plenty fast to stay ahead of the current rate of sea level increase. Coral growth rates have been measured at a reported 280 mm/year in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal (Sewell 1935), and 414 mm/year in the Celebes (Verstelle 1932).
On the coral atoll where I used to live, we had to go out and clear out the channel into the lagoon every three to five years or so, because the coral had grown up a foot or more, enough to endanger the ships that were entering … and much, much faster than the few mm of sea level rise during that time.
Your statement that there “very well might be areas of healthy coral in the world” simply reveals that you haven’t spent much time in the ocean. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of healthy reefs from above and below the surface, along with some (not a lot, but far too many) that are sick, and some that are dead. My advice would be to stick to subjects where you don’t have to say “there very well might be” …
Finally, there is absolutely no indication that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, or is historically unusual. Perhaps you could provide a citation that shows that the coral will have to grow “several orders of magnitude faster than they ever did”, that’s simply wild exaggeration. There is nowhere on earth that has seen sea level rises of that magnitude, even at the end of the last ice age.
For example, from about 15,000 to 14,000 years ago, during the time identified with “Meltwater Pulse 1a” as the earth came out of the ice age, the sea level rose about 32 metres in about a thousand years. That works out to a rate of about 32 millimetres/year, or about ten times the current rate … and the atolls survived that. But that was as fast as the rise got, ten times the current rate, not a hundred times as you claim.
You are correct that the atolls can only stay above sea level if the coral is healthy, but that is not an argument that the islands are threatened by rising seas. It applies even if the sea level is unchanging, because the surface of the atoll is constantly being eaten away by wind and wave, and unless it is constantly replenished by new coral sand from the surrounding reefs, it will disappear very soon. The rise and fall of the ocean is meaningless, the health of the reef is the issue.
The coral atoll islands are not threatened by changing sea levels, they are threatened by human interference with the health of the corals, through killing fish, through pollution, through killing Giant Tritons, through coral mining for construction and the aquarium trade, and through silt runoff. As a surfer and a diver, I can only agree that humans need to pay more attention to the health of the reefs, you have my full support in that.
And you are correct that human built structures will not rise up with the islands, at least not by themselves … but I’m not sure what your point is there. If you build on an island that goes up and down with the sea level, that’s just an issue you have to deal with, just like builders in California have to deal with earthquakes.
What an incidence so singular as to have a name, when compared to events now so common as to not warrent a unique moniker?
You know, the entire NYT archive is available for free, so you could post a link to the article that quote originates from, so it could be read in context.
Of course, there is one person on this board (at the very least) who has to deal with the issue of global warming as part of their professional capacity and as AFAIK, Una’s never called it a “crock of shit”, which, if it were her professional opinion that it was, she wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Anyone who’s been here any length of time knows what Una’s professional qualifications are. What’s yours? That you’re paid to post anti-AGW comments on the internet?
How many tornadoes were there this winter in the United States and when were they?
And you could ask nicely for a link.
Lol. Such a typical “warmer” response after they’ve gotten their ass kicked on the merits: Appeal to authority and engage in ad hominem attacks. Bonus points if you claim that your opponent is an industry shill.
No more, no less. Given that there’s credible scientific reports predicting that a rise in CO[sub]2[/sub] could have warming affects on the climate going back to at least the 1950s, I see nothing in your link to throw it into question.
And another standard tactic is to dodge the question.
Maybe because the Great Southern Tornado Outbreak consisted of some 60 tornadoes?
I have no idea what your point is.
Which in fact you have done – since you haven’t named these plants and animals that have been extincted by man-made global warming. But you do get points for self-awareness.
My claim was that we had tornadoes this winter, which I provided a link establishing that fact. Listing the ones which have occured nationally along with their location would prove nothing, unless it was combined with that same data from the point you named (which, I note was later in the year than the ones I mentioned) to the present day. If such a listing proved that tornadoes were common in TN at the beginning of Feb., then you could say I was full of shit. Given that you haven’t proffered such information, I’d say it doesn’t exist.
For $100, I’ll consider it.
Tell you what, if you can prove you’ve got qualifications equal to or better than Una’s, I’ll not post another word about global warming to this board again.
It’s not like tornadoes are completely unknown in Tennesee in February; historically, February falls in the second-tier group of months in which tornadoes occur in the state. See here: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/research/torcli.htm. The data on that site was compiled from 1830 through 2003. The big three months for tornado activity are March, April and May, as they are almost everywhere in the southeast. However, January, February, June and November make up a second tier; historically, each month has roughly six percent of all the tornadoes for Tennessee. Bringing up the rear in terms of tornado activity are the months of July, August, September, October and December.
So a tornado outbreak in February in Tennessee isn’t rare by any stretch.
You seemed to be claiming that recent tornado activity was unprecedented. Which would appear to be false. Assuming that recent tornado activity is NOT unprecedented, how is it evidence of catastrophic AGW?
Are you claiming that recent tornado activity is unprecedented or not?
Just so the audience knows, I’m not debating anything in this thread, nor putting my qualifications and experience on the floor to debate anyone on this message board at this juncture. I’ll also state that despite working on carbon and energy-related topics on nearly a daily basis, I am not an expert on the root causes or potential root causes of AGW theory, nor am I a meteorologist or climate scientist (I do have some working for me, however, who I rely upon.)
I will state that as a persona opinion that I do believe AGW is occurring, but I question whether the net impacts will be nearly as negative as postulated. However, I also feel that we should proceed with a strategy under the assumption that the impacts will be potentially highly negative, while concurrently working to assess the impacts better, because of my assessment of both the risk of making the wrong decision, and my long-held policy of making some hard decisions to greatly improve energy efficiency in all sectors.
I have no idea what your point is.