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As Seas Rise, Maldives Seek To Buy a New Homeland
Peace Corps Online writes "The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as insurance against climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees as the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59 cm by the year 2100. Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water so even a 'small rise' in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago. 'We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,' says the Muslim country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, adding that he has already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be 'receptive.' India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates; Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. 'We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.'"
They have nothing to worry about, Global Warming is just a myth!
...Right?
If the summary is correct, and they are only 150 centimeters above water... than this isn't a very good place to build regardless of global warming or not. Your average over-sized wave could swamp the entire island.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't most of that "unoccupied territory," "unoccupied" because it's a very harsh environment, basically desert, that isn't really suitable for settling?
The most likely way that they can raise awareness is by suing a large country. If they were to sue the US government for providing an environment which encourages companies to pollute in, they could then collect for damages in the form of a replacement parcel, or enough money to buy a replacement parcel. Granted they would likely lose their country due to eminent domain, but they would gain awareness and money in the meanwhile.
Ps - I'm not trolling by saying the Gvt is encouraging it, that's just how I would phrase the lawsuit.
Is 7 meters(ca. 21 feet) below sealevel and we are not leaving. Running is a bad solution. Fight the water because it will fight you. Feet getting wet? Build dams and dykes and stay safe. That idea is probably 10 times cheaper and more efficient than the whole "move everyboy out and buy a new homeland plan".
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Just for the convenience of keeping borders "manageable", I doubt any place they occupy can be elsewhere but on a seashore. Who'd want to lock themselves in a country, only to have them embargo you over a trade dispute? I mean, being land-locked is bad enough, but being bad locked inside a country that's bigger than you, whose standing army outnumbers you and who doesn't like you anymore?
On the other hand, maybe New Zealand will offer a better deal.
Your question is simple, but the answer is not. Sea levels have risen 120 meters during this interglacial warming period. Should the Greenland ice cap melt again, then they may rise up to another 7 meters. That is the maximum. The fact that these islands exist above current sea levels is proof that the sea levels have been higher than they are now. These islands are basically relic coral reefs and hence formed under water.
Cheers
JE
Seeing as how their country is being turned into a desert. I'm not sure which is worse, personally. Having your homeland washed out to sea, or being told that you have to make do with land that would require probably tens of billions of dollars (that you don't have, and probably will never have) to start turning into semi-usable living space.
Most places will never be able to even consider buying other land. Nasheed has been running a program for a few years now to make his people viable transplants to new cultures. He knows they need new skill sets and will need to be highly adaptive to make this viable. He does not seem to think buying huge tracts of land will work. He even states in much of what I've seen that they'll eventually lose their culture and just be absorbed by the new nations they disperse into.
(I'm uninformed on Bangladesh so I cannot comment on them specific.)
Other places either wait for help (which will never arrive from the uninformed or the uncaring) or will be forced to just make a run for it at the last moment. Displaced refugees NEVER works. This proves out time and time again. Even the poorest of nations could start asking to allow very small groups to be allowed in now in an effort to begin a relocation program. Nasheed, when queried on keeping his people together, says that in 50 years he does not expect them to maintain much if any of their culture. He knows the idea of just displacing one group into another never works and is planning on blending his people in small increments.
As for agreeing it's manmade, I'm still on the fence on that. Man-helped, no doubt. And should we carbon-whores pay into a sollution, yes we should. The people of nations like this are on the very low end of responsible. (But even the Maldives have concrete roads and cars!) But we've only walked erect a few million years. The face of this planet in that space of time has changed. In a billion years this planet's face has changed dramatically. So change is a constant. We just don't adapt as well as other species. We like finding blame and do not seem to flow well this type of change.
In which court?
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
Doing this would probably make the Maldives sink even quicker, because it would kill the coral, which is what actually keeps the islands out of the water... Before trying to solve a environmental issue you have to make sure that it won't engender a worse problem...
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Sorry, that video is scientific garbage.
There was not a global 30cm drop in seal level around 1970, which would be quite noticeable.
Local mean sea level varies quite a bit due to geological factors and local weather effects such as atmospheric pressure. This produces statistical variation on various scales; individual locations might well see contrary trends; even aggregate trends smoothed over three year weighted averages tend to have considerable noise.
In any case, an island like the one in the video is a poor choice as a benchmark because mean sea level varies across the Pacific by as much as 60cm at any given time due to atmospheric effects. The El Nino/Southern Oscillation could well produce dramatic shifts in local MSL on an island like this. Pressure driven changes in MSL in this region can reach 30cm or in rare cases even more.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Call me a troll if you want, but 300,000 Maldiveian people moving into India will be met with fierce opposition. Not because the country is already overpopulated, but because these 300,000 folks are Muslim.
Read up the history of India to understand the immense damage Muslims have done and are still doing, and you will sympathize with us if we shut our doors on Muslim immigrants.
Whatever the secularists may say, fact is - if the Muslim population becomes the majority in a certain area, you can be sure as hell that they will demand separate nationhood. That was how Pakistan came into existence. And look what's happening in Kashmir - they drove out all Hindus and now they say their hearts are with Pakistan!
Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have changed the demography in the Nort East Indian state of Assam. They now want a separate muslim state there. They are fighting for it. By setting off bombs in the state.
Sorry and all that, but tell the Maldievean people to go somewhere else.
Number's don't seem to add up...
3.1mm/yr, and the entire country is only 115 sq. miles, with a third of the population in the capital city, which sits on less than 1 square mile. Additionally, from a brief glance at the most populous towns/villages, it looks like another third of the population is residing on no more than 10 sq. miles.
Would it really be more cost effective to move the entire population to a new "homeland", instead of investing in efficiently condensing the population, and building a levee system around the current well-developed, and incredibly expensive-to-replace infrastructure?!!?
This smells like a "Poor us!" bid for attention and money, playing off of the "green guilt" of the rest of the developed world.
In other words...I'm calling shenanigans.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Arrogant? Why? We have the ability to wipe most human life off the planet in about an hour using nuclear weapons. Why is it arrogance to think we could do it in 50 years by other means?
And you're an asshole for making sweeping generalizations based on anecdotes and, most likely, for speaking about subjects on the sole basis of hearsay from idiot reporters.
You want a flame war? We can do that. Or, you stop believing in the fallacy of a single cause. Katrina was a natural disaster, an engineering disaster (with many complicated aspects), a governmental disaster (at all levels), and a humanitarian disaster (the most visible part). And Katrina is only a small part of the problem: you are apparently ignorant of the longstanding and ongoing ecological disaster which is the whole of southeast Louisiana.
Another brain eaten by the propagandist Steven Milloy. Blah blah taxes. Blah blah free market.
They don't need an excuse to take your money. The framework for taxation is present and they can increase your taxes whenever they feel like it. The fact that your country is monstrously in the hole would be a fine reason to raise your taxes. The fact that a substantial portion of your country's population wants to conquer the Muslims in the name of 'defense' is a fine reason to raise your taxes. The fact that a large percentage of your senior population depends upon entitlement programs to live day to day is a fine reason to raise your taxes.
But naturally it's the competitive and antagonistic process of rigorous scientific research that is the true rationale for raising your taxes. Nothing to see here, just an international conspiracy to raise the taxes.
To some extent, it's pretty irrelevant whether humans are changing it or not. The true question is "What is the cost of the changing climate, and what is the cost of fixing it?" This of course begs the question of whether the change is manmade or not, but it's not the starting point.
No, the effect humans are having is ALL that matters when trying to figure out the cost of 'fixing' climate change. The cost of preventing climate change is 100% dependent on how much our activity can impact it. If our influence on climate change is enormous maybe we could change it enough by spending $10 per year, but if we have only a small influence on climate change, even trillions of dollars may not be enough to change climate to a meaningful extent.
We have a cost/benefit equation before us to choose between adapting to climate change, and trying to stop it, or some combination there of. The impact that we can have on climate change is of unquestionable importance to that decision and the alarmists seem to think that by setting the costs for adaptation at infinity they can ignore the question, they can't.