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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.'"
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?
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
Muslims and Jews take matters into their own hands and fix their own problems.
Which explains why Israel has been at peace with her neighbors since her inception and the Middle East is one of the nicest places on Earth to call home......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
A true environmentalist SHOULD be skeptical about a body of law explicitly allowing developing nations to pollute. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do, because there is not in fact any real benefit to it. The simple truth is that it is more cost-effective to be "green" over any kind of reasonable time scale.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I really don't get why people are so reluctant to consider that burning 80 million barrels of oil each day does not affect the climate. I keep hearing those "Oh, I don't believe it" voices on /., but really, is it anything else than an excuse for not changing a wasteful lifestyle? A bit like an addict would deny having a problem?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
A true environmentalist SHOULD be skeptical about a body of law explicitly allowing developing nations to pollute. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do, because there is not in fact any real benefit to it. The simple truth is that it is more cost-effective to be "green" over any kind of reasonable time scale.
It also seems counterproductive from an economic standpoint. If we make carbon emissions expensive in the United States and Europe what's to stop companies from moving carbon-intensive parts of their operations to China and India? Then we lose twice -- we haven't brought emissions down any (in fact we probably brought them up due to the logistics of moving goods greater distances) and we've wiped out jobs and a tax base here at home.
I think we need a big investment into green technology but agreeing to mandated cuts in emissions while simultaneously agreeing to allow developing countries to increase emissions seems like an incredibly dumb idea to me. We are screwing ourselves environmentally and economically.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
agreeing to allow developing countries to increase emissions seems like an incredibly dumb idea to me
Are you kidding me?! Take a look at any 'developing nation' in Africa. Many people can't even get clean water, much less food, and you expect them not to increase emissions/go green?! These countries are printing million dollar notes because of absurd inflation and you are not allowing them to increase emssions?! Developing countries have no other choice than to use the cheapest energy source, period. As a country progresses, economically and technologically, they can begin to invest into cleaner technologies and eventually start to go 'green'. Even here in American it is still more expensive to consumer green energy than it is to consume oil and coal. With your complete and utter ignorance of economic conditions of developing countries and, it seems, the basics of economics, you should be more circumspect in questioning other people's intelligence.
We shouldn't be wasteful, and I agree that we may be effecting the climate, but stories like this just smack of "the sky is falling" all over again. Why can't we have environmentalism without the alarm? Thats the kind of environmentalist I am, I just want to attempt to stop being wasteful and live more frugally and more in-line with nature (now I know its impossible to be completly CO2 free, but we can do better then we are now.)
There are better ways to combat environmental problems then alarmism.
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living. But if we clean up our act, then China may simply follow suit.
I would like to see progress made on green technology (which will translate into more jobs and economic recovery) so that we can bring emissions down and sell that technology to the rest of the World -- but why all of this focus on Kyoto when the protocol itself is inherently unfair to developed countries?
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
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.