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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?
Yes, we have immense amounts of unoccupied land, but with no water in sight. There's no way that putting them out in the middle of the desert regions would be helping them out - they'd be from one extreme to another!
Amenacier
Yes, but Australia, the country, is entirely contiguous with the continent. I can't imagine us (now or in the future) being very receptive to the idea of another country buying their way onto the continent and having to set up borders etc.
Besides, who'd want to move from a tropical archipelago to - let's face it - a desert? Sri Lanka is a much more likely candidate.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I've never been happier to be separated from the sea by two mountain ranges. Non-ocean view be damned, at least I'm not gonna flood!
How much have the sea levels actually risen?
Nasheed's quote at the end of the summary really made me recall Bangladesh, where my parents are from. It's another country that is under major threat from climate change. I've often wondered what Bangladeshi people would do when the flood waters finally get bad enough to make the country uninhabitable, through no fault of their own (most of the people there are remarkably poor). I once read a touching BBC article where a village farmer complained that he was losing his country so Westerners could drive in their cars.
I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries, especially West Bengal in India, but the Maldives seems to have a "good" (at least practical) idea. Sadly the Bangladeshi government is too inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic to manage something as well thought out, costly, and long term as that.
I fully expect to have to explain to my kids that Bangladesh was where their grandparents were from but that it no long exists (above the ocean, anyway).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
As tourism takes a hit from the economic crisis, this is a great piece of advertising. "Visit the beautiful Maldives while you still can!"
I just emailed my senator yesterday because I was concerned about the mention that environmental refugees (which there have already been several groups) are not recognized by the international community, and was hoping to at least get the idea mentioned before the senate.
I hope he reads it, or a staffer does - seeing as he just got a promotion and might be a little busy.
--
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meh
I'd try to post some offbeat humorous comment, but I don't see a damn thing funny about this.
I helped a photographer assemble footage for a piece he's doing about this. He's gone there and stayed with Mohamed Nasheed for a few years running. The place is small enough that everyone more or less knows everyone. From what I saw they are incredibly pragmatic and dignified about this. They don't want a handout but would like to bring the world's attention to it. There are dozens of similar smaller nations that will not have the luxury of money to perchance buy their way out of this. I suspect, when this reaches critical mass, money won't be much of factor anyway. I hope the entire world will be able to be as calm and dignified and take a cue from the way they're currently dealing with it.
"Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. "
There are very good reasons why we have an immense amount of unoccupied land in Australia...
Picture Fallout 3, minus the radiation and ruins. And water. And trees. And people. Feel free to leave in the giant bugs and mutants though...
Contrary to popular oppinion, London is not burning. It is, in fact, quite nippy.
I know a guy who visits maldives often (mainly to go scuba diving). Their language is very similar to singalese (lang spoken in srilanka) and their food is a combination of Srilankan and Kerala (a state in India) food. I would tend to think they would look at buying land at these places rather than Australia
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.
Or how about buying a shitload of dirt?
Here in Amsterdam we live 1.5 meter below sea level but I have no reason to worry
Good choice for some famous last words!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Sounds preposterous, but the UAE has already built several artificial islands of a size that could easily house the population of the Maldives. If the UAE can then surely the Maldives can too. The major issue of course is that any new island would have to be raised to anticipate sea level changes otherwise it would be as flat and vulnerable as the old one. I don't know the details of any plan to purchase land but it seems doubtful to me that it would ensure a place to live if the Maldives sunk under the waves. I doubt any country would want 300,000 additional people dumped on their doorstep short of a major humanitarian relief effort. And the Maldives isn't in that situation yet.
Yeah, but whatever you do and however much you try to raise your land, at the end of the day you are still in that junkie-infested hellhole. best regards, a fellow cheesehead from rotterdam! :-)
Perhaps because the Maldives is a chain of over 1,000 low atolls rather than a contiguous land mass with a continent on one side of it?
Not only will he lower sea levels in the long run, ;)
but in the short term, he can teach them to walk on water.
In Dubai, they're building som really large artificial islands. How expensive would it be to raise the occupied parts of the maldieves by a meter anyway?
It's actually.....Republic of Maldives.
http://www.presidencymaldives.gov.mv/pages/index.php
http://www.maldivesinfo.gov.mv/home/index.php
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
1. Go to australian desert
2. Digg additional 150cm of mud/rocks/sand/whatever
3. ???
4. Profit
That would be a metric shitload, of course....
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
Maybe they could buy desert portions from Australia and move them to the atols to compensate the land eroded by the sea...?
If Denmark was a series of extremely tiny islands, you'd have a point. But it's not, so you don't.
The problem is that Australia doesn't recycle water. The reason they don't is because they have a peculiar habit of asking the population to vote on things and people are very hard to convince of this sort of thing.
Here in the UK we've survived for generations on recycled water but Queenslanders would rather go parched than drink 'shit'.
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.
Somebody care to explain? I did not read the links..
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How about this: I'll give them New Jersey (yes, I have the authority) and I'll take my chances with the sea level. When can we hammer out the deal?
They could become the planet's first all ocean living nation, and start really developing that sort of tech (especially how to deal with more extreme ocean events...). Just start buying up old ships and refurb them to be floating houses, businesses, even little mini farms. Just a wild thought. I know if I lived there, I'd be trying to cob together a little floating miniark instead of building the traditional ..whatever they got, hovel/shack. Just a house that could float if flood water rise, a big raft, oil drums and logs, whatever. I mean this exists already as expensive houseboats, that mostly just sit tethered to a marina slip, but no reason they need to be so elaborate and expensive, just float and not leak that bad. With that said, carrying the concept further, there are a lot of boats and ships scrapped all the time that perhaps could be recycled, even if it was just into being barges.
Another option is massive terraforming, take what is the swampiest land they have, dig out thousands of miles of canals, use the dredged out soil to build up what good and higher elevation parts of the land they want to save, and just skip land roads for the most part, use the canals for transportation. They could start small, literally with what manpower and equipment exists (example: china terracing entire mountains for farming using shovels and baskets mostly), just small ditch canals wide enough to pass two canoes next to each other, then gradually work that out bigger until it can handle normal decent boats, then onto real ships and barges of whatever size work out to be practical. Of course, that means salt water everywhere, but seeing as how this will happen anyway if the oceans really rise....might be an option short of trying to find some donor space for what, 150 million people someplace else? 150 thousand can go be refugees, 150 million might start to run into complications even more daunting than a nationwide land reclamation/canal/lotta boats project. I don't know much about that nation at all, I would guess being so low they already have a lot of existing water based transportation and access. Just move heavy that way more.
Wouldn't constructing floodbanks (dikes) be a must cheaper option? Here in Amsterdam we live 1.5 meter below sea level but I have no reason to worry...
The issue is really with the unique geography of the Maldives. The country is actually a chain of 1,000+ tiny islands - some of them barely large enough to actually be called an island. You'd have to import all the raw materials for those dikes, and you'd wind up with more wall than land in many places.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The could move here, or start building their own.
Sealand
Eschew Obfuscation
The world was not several degrees warmer then. Stop spreading that uneducated meme.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
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.
It may be a lot cheaper (though less dramatic) to import a few shiploads of sand from Saudi Arabia and raise the level of the atolls by a couple of meters.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIbTJ6mhCqk
Iceland is bankrupt. They could pick it up for the cost of the debt. http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2008/10/iceland_goes_ba.htmlIcelandGoesBankrupt
*** Don't be dull.***
That's a very different animal. You don't live on an island surrounded by water in a typhoon-ridden area. You only have a relatively small coastline compared to your borders, and a relatively small portion of the country in the areas below sea level. The Maldives islanders are at risk of being simply washed off the top of their mountain and therefore they have to look at other options than ending up living in a huge cofferdam.
Virg
Yes, why don't you use the truthiness you feel in your gut as the end of all arguments.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Apparently residents from Manhattan will be watching closely and anxiously taking notes on how this gets resolved.
Another International leader got fed junk science it seems and he unfortunately see it as a way to raise tax for the inhabitants. It's appalling how often statistical methods are used to arrive at strange conclusions.
But getting overwhelmed by water ain't so bad, they could just live in a boathouse. 100 years is long enough for everyone to adjust to their new lifestyle.
Or they could build more condos and apartments to accomondate the receding land. The water isn't going to drown everything, just a portion of stuff by the beach.
Most of the population live in the larger islands where the land is much higher than the 159cm average. In fact each month, the tide is going to rise a few metres. But still I didn't see the Maldives relocating to India on a monthly basis.
If it is good enough for the President, it is good enough for me.
There was a group of dreamers a while back with an idea they called the Millennium Project. One of their ideas for solving the population crunch was creating artificial islands to populate the empty reaches of the equatorial waters. I don't remember all of the details of their plan, it's been years, but the islands themselves would be created by pulling calcium out of sea water, I think using some form of electrolysis. You lay metal grids in the water, run a current, and the calcium grows on the grid like sugar on a string with rock candy.
The islands themselves would be like giant dinner plates floating on the water, but I assume with enclosed flotation chambers so a good sloshing wouldn't sink them as it does with the dinner plate. The goal here would be extremely green and low-impact living so the islands would generate their own power via green and renewable methods, crops would be grown on the upper surface, and waste would be recycled. The experience here would be less like a cruise ship and more like low-impact commune living.
The habitat itself would have a submerged lip around the edge that would be perfect for the formation of corals and home for shallow water fish. Even if the island were moored in deep water, it would be a a fine habitat, much like a volcanic island can rise from the abyssal plane and suddenly there's a nice shallow water habitat for fish.
The really cool part is that these islands could theoretically be free-floating, drifting with the currents and floating around the world, using powered propulsion only when pushed too close to obstructions.
These islands represent a fairly interesting idea in population management. Right now, we have too damn many people on the planet. Now I know we're not going to get people to reduce population the way we're living now, there'd be blood in the streets if anyone forced them to. And not doing anything will just lead to ecological collapse, mass starvation, wars, and the population will be whittled down through attrition. But if we could get people a safe, clean, sustainable standard of living away from the cycle of poverty, the west has already shown that birthrates will naturally stabilize and begin to decline. The problem manages itself without coercion.
I don't know how likely it would be but I think it would be extremely cool if the islanders could just build their own replacements and say "fuck global warming, we're ready for it." Maybe the Dutch can join them, not sure how much longer their dikes can hold out.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water"
Considering that as little as 800-1000 years ago, the Maldives were apparently under meters of seawater, where did the Maldivians come from?
Isn't this something like building your house on the beach at low tide, and then panicking as the sea rolls in, but on a slower scale?
-Styopa
These damn dunes are in the way, meters high mounds of sand, and yet they say the ocean is right there, at eyes high on the other side. Bloody dunes, best they be done away with. I want to see the OCEAN!
(Check height map of The Netherlands), it is part of the low countries for a reason.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ma ba na em num en ba mu fu shi ba fu nam.
That calculator is doing it wrong, and the web page was clearly written by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
How much have the sea levels actually risen?
Why ask? Just pass the Kyoto Protocol and we can adjust sea levels as we see fit.
In which case the video is no argument against global sea level rise, which is well documented.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem is that Australia doesn't recycle water. The reason they don't is because they have a peculiar habit of asking the population to vote on things and people are very hard to convince of this sort of thing.
Here in the UK we've survived for generations on recycled water but Queenslanders would rather go parched than drink 'shit'.
No, the problem is stupid and/or malevolent government. Here in my area in SE QLD there has been mild water shortage for over 20 years. It has also been one of the countries fastest growing population centres over that time. We also had water tank bans for aesthetic reasons.
This is a climate that has periodic droughts. It was obvious this was going to be a problem. If tanks and been allowed (and required for new building permits) and the expectation was that the council water supply was for a backup, we would quite simply not have any water supply problems now. We would have no need for recycled water if we took the view that in the ordinary course of life it is up to the individual to provide their own water, rather than depending on government supply.
Anybody with a rural background, such as myself, could have told them that 20 years ago if they were willing to listen.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
You're a nitwit. Aircraft carriers hold a crew of 5,000, so by stretching it to extremes you could fit 25,000 people on it. The poulation of Maldives is 350,000. Also, they're not dirt poor refugees. Maldives makes a lot of money from tourism. Does this city look like shacks and hovels? It's the capital of Maldives.
Virg
Recycling water would help greatly, though. As you say, the tanks are now allowed or must be as my future Brisbanite father-in-law has one. He claimed there was a plan to build a dam or something similar about 20 years back but it was vetoed at the time.
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.
Singapore has a very successful land reclamation project, to increase the size of the island.
Why not a land elevation project? It would be a huge project, but straightforward, and more convenient than losing your homeland.
Or, you could go up in one of the many three or four story buildings that aren't directly on the waterfront if you're on one of the more populous islands, which is what most of the residents did. Or, if you're out on one of the resort islands you could leave your bungalow in one of the ferryboats, go out five hundred yards into the ocean and let the tsunami pass under you, which is what a lot of the other residents and tourists did.
Virg
Sure! why not? Australia DOES have HUGE amounts of uninhabited land ...
Of course, let's not forget that this also happens to coincide with Australia having the second largest desert in the world ;)
But hey, they wouldn't have to worry about water levels.
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.
In this case, he is talking about the Maldives and not an island! And the seal level is dropping around the Maldives.
Recycling water would help greatly, though.
Well you could say any source of water would help. Requiring adequate tank volume for your own water supply on all new buildings would be a solution that automatically scaled to any amount of population growth though. It would also have the effect of promoting efficient water use if any water from the municipal supply was charged. I understand you can recycle water, but why would you if it's unnecessary? We have an average rainfall of 1200mm/year. If we had tanks, there is an abundance of water, even now.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
No. I'm just saying that the kinds of things that produce local sea level variations at certain sites aren't going cancel out the long term trends. Either (a) the Maldives needs to plan for future sea level rises on the order of the global average over the last fifty years or (b) they ought to have reason to believe that the global average rise in sea levels will level off or reverse. They can't hope for local atmospheric pressure to increase enough to compensate, or for wind patterns to shift more surface water their way. Nor can they assume that factors that have masked global trends won't somehow reverse.
Planning, then, is sensible and prudent. In a country where most of the land is only about 1m above sea level, a 3.1 mm/year rise in global MSL is a very serious concern. It's not that an island with a high point of 1m is going to turn into a sandbar in twenty or thirty years; it's that the impacts of events like unusually large cyclones or tsunamis are going to be magnified.
I'm not "working for the IPCC". I'm working against public policy by wishful thinking. I'm working for the application of rationality and prudence to problems like this. Nobody is calling for abandoning the Maldives while they are still inhabitable; they are calling for making preparations should projected changes in sea level change the status quo. This preparation could take the form of land investments that would return value to the islands during such period as evacuation remains unnecessary.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that a country where most of the land is between 1 and 1.5m above local MSL can afford to ignore a 3.1mm/year rise in global MSL.
You are assuming that the geological and atmospheric phenomenon that counterbalance global sea level change will keep pace. That may be true over the short term at least, but this particular country doesn't have much margin of error.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"My name is johannesg, and I'm here to ask you a question: is a man entitled to the sweat of his brow?"
Sure, it would be hard to seal all the buildings, but think how cool it would be!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIbTJ6mhCqk
"Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)"
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
So, we have these relict coral atols atop volcanic seamounts, and sometimes the islands rise, and sometimes they sink. Volcanic bulges do that, as magma inflates or deflates the magma chamber. This isn't global worming, this is geology.
Sorry about that. I tell a lot of bad jokes.
But in either case, you're dealing with totally different problems, and completely different challenges for elevations. You defended a river delta, not an archipelago.
Netherlands
lowest point: Zuidplaspolder -7 m
highest point: Vaalserberg 322 m
Maldives
lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m
highest point: unnamed location on Wilingili island in the Addu Atoll 2.4 m
(CIA world fact book)
But if blinding patriotism helps you sleep at night, we've got an old politician who's about to retire, and isn't welcome in many places besides Crawford, Texas. You should give him a call.
1) To get modded Insightful:
Say man is responsible for Global Warming
2) To get modded Flamebait, Troll, Offtopic:
Have a healthy skepticism of #1
A good reason to either stop f**king or start taking those pills that the white girls do. Jeez looks like ya'll running out of room out there in the Maldives.
Am a Maldivian and am surprised by the amount of coverage this is getting. The comment (by our president) was in the context of, IMO, "we need to save money - have a fund, for the worst case scenario". Sooooo not what is being made out of it. :)
And I personally don't understand why you think an oderless, colorless gas is somehow equivalent to "the Earth putting on a sweater", to borrow the popular analogy. I'm really not sure why you are so quick to accept that a random gas is more likely to be the cause of the warming than, say, the sun, considering that solar activity and sunspot activity have a stronger correlation to temperature trends. Additionally, the sun has been in a period of exceptional activity for the last 70 years or so, which just happens to correspond to our planetary warming trends. And now, when sunspot activity suddenly drops off, we had one of the coldest winters on record in North America last year (and look to be heading for another), Arctic sea ice actually expanded during the winter, and in the Southern hemisphere, Brazil recorded one of the latest snowfalls it has ever had.
Why should we just accept your "burning oil" theory and not consider at other alternatives? Why should we simply assume that burning 80 million barrels of oil a day has more effect on our climate than solar activity, considering the sun is the biggest furnace within lightyears, and without which this planet would be a couple hundred degrees below freezing no matter what the C02 content of the air is? If the sun suddenly went out, our atmosphere could be 100 percent C02 (or methane) and wouldn't retain its heat any longer. It is a completely negligible force in comparison to what effect solar output can have on our climate. In fact, I'd more quickly believe that our own exothermic reactions from burning oil (and the ambient heat they generate) are slowly heating the atmosphere than I would believe that a gas, by itself, is somehow responsible for climate change.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Ah yes, very true. My comment was really to counter the argument that Australia doesn't have enough water to support the current population, which you've done an even better job of debunking than I did. Cheers :D
So many interesting parallels... "The Sea and Summer" by Australian author George Turner comes to mind. It was written in 1987 and mentions this exact issue. It's a bit cheesy overall but quite a good book really.
The people/government of a country are PLANNING ahead. I sincerely, and emphatically applaud them.
From TFS:
"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.
Too bad the dipshits in New Orleans can't rip a page out of this foresight and brilliance.
The atmosphere has a mass of over 5×10^18 kg (five billion billions). That's a fart in a stadium.
What is this "global mean temperature" that's being cited? How does one average an intensive thermodynamic quantity in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere? The only physically meaningful way to do this is to:
1) use the local humidity to determine the local heat content
2) average the heat contents across the globe
3) use an average humidity to convert back to an average temperature
Is this what is being done? There is a Wikipedia article on the instrumental temperature record, but no indication of what the actual averaging procedure is. The "instrumental humidity record" is notable by its absence in all these discussions, which makes me think that this is NOT what is being done, in which case the "global average temperature" is simply meaningless.
Curiously, the little-talked-about ocean temperature record and the undoubtedly real rise in ocean levels due to rising ocean temperatures appears to be far better evidence for anthropogenic global warming than all of the atmospheric modelling combined.
For some years I've been looking for a compelling argument, one way or another, on global warming, and the more deeply I've looked into the atmospheric physics the more appalled I've become that anyone wants to base strong policies on it. Oceans are actually much simpler systems than the atmosphere, so I guess that's where I'll look next.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
just to straighten something out here, and for whichever knee jerking mods who didn't notice anything either..check parent to my reply for a clue. YOU might want to improve your reading and forum surfing leet skilz. I was replying to the guy with the ties to bangladesh, *not* the maldives. And I was going from memory when I guessed at their population in bangladesh, which will be experiencing the same sort of widespread flooding if the oceans rise, so I just looked now, a scosh over 150 million, and they are real dang poor for the most part.
I'm all up for that.
We'll just have every citizen in US, UK, Germany, France, Sweden... etc. pay about 7000% tax to cover the costs of getting the developing countries up to the level.
Its only fair, considering most of them got to their 1st world status by slavery, colonization and exploitation of the said developing countries.
Say... About 300 years of that?
Not only is it fair, it is "more cost-effective" and "reasonable".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's an interesting thought..
Guantanamo bay is around 1/2.5 the size of the Maldives, but probably more usable land, and according to Obama the US is moving out anyways.
The climate is compearable, so just buy the naval base...
Building levees around a city's low-lying areas is achievable, but I doubt building them around an entire city when all of the ground is going to be under water, and expecting that to protect people forever is at all viable. For one thing, water will eventually seep in and find its own level. For another, maintaining those levees against continual water would, at best, require specialist underwater construction skills. Of course, we might find some newly popularised jobs like that once the environment changes enough.
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.
Worst arcology ever. :(
The atmosphere has a mass of over 5×10^18 kg (five billion billions). That's a fart in a stadium.
that 80 million barrels creates about 34,898,285,714 kg of CO2 a day, every day.
Since the atmosphere has about 2% CO2, every year you are adding about .001% and this is accelerating.
While one days CO2 is a fart in a stadium, it adds up. Remember, a stadium sits 50,000 people...and each one is farting away. Do you still want to sit in there?
The likely global rise in sea levels for the next century is much less than the tidal surge. So they've either been flooding all along, or are going to be fine. In either case, this is silly.
Depends who you believe. It's not like we had weather stations everywhere back then.
We can't even get today's temperatures right. This week, Hansen announced October 2008 was the hottest October ever... and then the "skeptics" pointed out he had re-used data from September.
"(American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 are dwarfed the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times."
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html
This page has a good quote:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/223957/72
"I have never heard a skeptic making that ridiculous claim. It seems you are putting up a straw man in order to be able to kick it. The skeptics are not that dumb."
I guess you just proved them wrong, eh?
Research isn't hard, it takes all of two seconds to type "CO2 volcanoes" into google: http://www.google.es/search?q=co2+volcanoes
Try it sometime.
No sig today...
The Maldives holds the record for being the lowest country in the world, with a maximum natural ground level of only 2.3 m (7½ ft) with the average being only 1.5 m above sea level, though in areas where construction exists this has been increased to several metres. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 20 centimetres (8 in);[citation needed] further rises of the ocean could threaten the existence of Maldives. However, around 1970 the sea level there dropped 20-30 cm.[10] In November of 2008, President Mohamed Nasheed announced plans to look into purchasing new land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia, due to his concerns about global warming and the possibility of much of the island being inundated with water from rising sea levels. Current estimates place sea level rise at 59 cm by the year 2100.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldives
This seems to say there has been no rise in the last 30 years.
http://www.schmanck.de/KlimaWiss/Morner.INQUA.1.7.pdf
The new sea level curve of the Maldives; present level reached ~4000 BP, sea
level strongly oscillating for regional dynamic reasons, a drop in sea level
~1970, no rise in the last 30 years.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
let's sell them New Jersy. No one objects, right?
How about contributing to the conversation rather than anonymously insulting someone?
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Humidity is not an independent variable, it is depenend on temperature. Probably the best way to monitor the temperature is to seperate the globe into some sensible areas (based on relevant time scale). For instance the average temperature of northern Europe is a well defined consept for millions of years. The Himalayas have probably been less stable climate wise (humidity) on the same time scale. If then the average temperature is rising in all these seperate areas of the globe at the same time, the total average is also clearly rising.
Another record from the ocean is the acidity (CO2 adsorption), something that again can be corolated to the industrial revolution. Of course all these things we are discussing is known to climate scientists...
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Personally I was born and brought up in London, and I consider myself a Londoner, rather than as "English" (IMO "England" isn't even a proper country, there's no "English Government". Culturally, I tend to have more in common with other Londoners, regardless of colour or creed, than with people from some other parts of England.
So I'm a Londoner, I'm British (UK passport), and I'm European (in the sense of having EU rights), but "England" doesn't come into it, for me.
And if you regard London as being almost a separate country, a hell of a lot of the population are "immigrants" in the sense that they aren't "born" Londoners, they've come from some other part of the UK. It's a constant "churn".
Eric Baird
...or just a well known speech made by somebody who was deliberately trying to cover up the truth? (aka: "Lying"). The guy responsible for that has a name, "Frank Luntz", and has since admitted he made it all up (under orders from Bush).
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/frank_luntz_acc.php
This sort of information (ie. concrete names, references, etc.) is what we call "pesky facts". Try it sometime.
> "Remember the global cooling scares in the 70's?"
Remember how accurate the weather forecasts were in the 1970s? They were a complete joke, right?
These days we have new toys like very accurate weather satellites which can measure *global* temperatures (the 70's scares were caused by lack of *global* temperature measurements and what's called the "island" effect). We also have big machines to process and visualize the data instead of slide rules.
IOW, the 1970's beliefs on climate are about as useful today as flared trousers and 8-track cartridges.
Again, google would have saved you from embarrassing yourself in public: http://www.google.es/search?q=1970s+climate+scare
No sig today...
BTW, does anyone know how much it costs to buy and ship landfill by the megatonne? Perhaps we could convert old oil-tankers. Are there any convenient deserts with portside access, where the locals don't care about donating a mass of dry sand and dirt, in exchange for perhaps getting a nice inland lake?
Eric Baird
Even Mythbusters have done the "does CO2 cause warming" experiment.
(Episode 118, April 26, 2008)
The greenhouse effect is real and has been known for centuries.
No sig today...
The greenhouse effect works. It's the basis of ... er ... greenhouses. Glass is an "odorless colorless" substance that's transparent to visible light but blocks infrared. Light enters the greenhouse, hits something inside, the innards warm up, the warm objects try to re-radiate the energy as infrared, and the glass stops that IR getting out again.
Similarly with CO2. Transparent to visible light, not so transparent to infrared.
Think of the difference between a dry winter night with and without cloud cover. The temperature tends to drop faster on the cloudless nights, yes? So greenhouse gases are like "one-way" cloud cover, they don't stop the sunlight coming in, but help keep the heat in once it's here.
So the greenhouse effect itself is real. The questions are:
(a) Is our climate currently changing in a significant way?
(b) How much of this is due to greenhouse effects?
(c) How much of the greenhouse contribution is due to human activity? And
(d) What are the cost-benefit implications of doing nothing versus doing something?
Eric Baird
Climate and sea levels do fluctuate naturally but not spontaneously, ie. there's usually an identifiable reason - big period of volcanic activity, new species of extra virile plants sucking out the CO2, stuff like that.
No sig today...
"...adding complexity to predictions about the impact" is not the same as "...shows it isn't happening".
Science is not still out, only you are. You're still repeating the false mantras created (and quite cynically, I might add...) by Bush when he was campaigning for office.
No sig today...
Queenslan IS the rpoblem, still allowing stupidly wasteful cotton farms, and rice farms and still issuing licenses for water they dont have.
Water tanks dont fill if there is no rain.
Water tanks dont fill if there is no rain.
It takes significantly more water to fill dams than it does tanks, and the water in the dams would not have been depleted if people were using tank water first. So tanks might have become empty from time to time but we would still have plenty of reserve water supply. I was referring to domestic water supply. You are correct that water shouldn't be wasted, but as for QLD being the problem, how's the Murray going.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
No.
One problem is that it takes temperature-based information and computes ice melt based on thermal transfer. As you might guess from this, they then have to model the heat reservoir of which you're measuring the temperature. They claim their heat reservoir is the atmosphere. It's not -- the Earth is thermally connected to atmosphere and exchanges heat with it. Connecting temperature and thermal transfer in this way is hokey at best, since it requires you to model a thermal reservoir you have limited knowledge about. It's best to approach the problem from a different angle. Instead, they choose to use a terribly wrong figure and go from there.
Many of the statements belie a flawed understanding of what's going on. They do not account for thermal expansion of seawater on the assumption that an ice-water mixture does not heat up until all the ice is melted. This is true if all the water and ice are in good thermal contact. It's also true that all the ice must be at 0 C if they are in good thermal contact, else it will absorb heat from the water and freeze it until they both reach 0 C. This is far from the case -- they point out that much ice is below 0 C. It's trivial to show that at least part of the world's oceans are above 0 C. The ocean-ice system is not a simple, single-temperature mixture. Nor, for that matter, is ice that is in the water the major factor in rising sea levels. You might expect free-floating ice to be in thermal equilibrium with nearby water, but free-floating ice will not (substantially) alter ocean levels when it melts. Land-bound ice is the major contributor. As its name suggests, its contact with the ocean is much more limited. (To be fair, they seem to recognize this, but not its thermodynamic implications.)
There are many things wrong with their analysis. They don't even have the knowledge or professionalism to use appropriate terminology, which calls into question their capacity to actually make reasonable calculations. For example, "...despite the fact the sun has been replenishing the number of kJ available to melt ice throughout that period."
"Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country."
Sure, if they want to live in the desert. Obviously the author has never been to Australia nor have they seen any pictures of the "immense .. unoccupied land".
There is a reason that the land is unoccupied....
Anybody with a rural background, such as myself, could have told them that 20 years ago if they were willing to listen.
Anybody with a rural background (like, say, the National Party) would have said: "population booming, droughts on and off, let's build a new dam or two to cope."
The Wolfdene dam was all but ready to go, then in 1989 the ALP was voted in.
First act: cancel the Wolfdene dam.
Quote from The Australian in early 2007:
In December 1989 the first act of Kevin Rudd, the new chief of staff to Queensland's incoming Labor premier, was to cancel plans for the Wolfdene dam. This was despite expert advice that such a dam would be needed for southeast Queensland in the early 21st century.
This was done to appease environmentalists who are dead against new dams anywhere. What we have now is an expensive water recycling plant ready to come on line. Such a pity it burns all those nasty fossil fuels to get anything done
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
They can move out, but they attract a lot of tourists, so it would be a shame to let the whole thing sink.
What they should do instead would be to build a huge dome of glass on top of the most important islands! The islands would now be bubbles of paradise, how cool is that? Oh boy I can't wait till the ocean levels increase by tens of meters! On top of that they could have tunnels connecting islands with a shallow depth of water inside of them so you could still travel by boat.
You just got troll'd!
So rural conservatives had more than one adequate solution then. :)
One advantage of tanks (as a requirement for new buildings) over a new dam is that the water supply scales automatically with the population. Don't get the hydroelectric power though, I'll give you that. Dams should only be the reserve water supply IMO.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
So rural conservatives had more than one adequate solution then. :)
Damn straight. That's something I've learned over the years - farmers are (on-the-whole) practical, can-do people. They can see a problem for what it is and see a solution.
One advantage of tanks (as a requirement for new buildings) over a new dam is that the water supply scales automatically with the population.
Problems with tanks:
- you can't get a tank big enough for a multi-storey dwelling (like a 20 storey place with 100 apartments).
- city-collected roof water would be polluted. No two ways about it, it wouldn't be good to drink. We only got rid of leaded petrol recently, so up until then there would have been dangerous levels of lead in the water
- reticulated water supplied by the local council actually does work and it can be done cheaply. It's only when there are ridiculous political interferences that we end up with the situation we have now
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Problems with tanks:
- you can't get a tank big enough for a multi-storey dwelling (like a 20 storey place with 100 apartments).
True enough, even given a tank, the roof catchment won't be enough. Most people don't live in one of those, so they could be an exception, but still pay/volume.
- city-collected roof water would be polluted. No two ways about it, it wouldn't be good to drink. We only got rid of leaded petrol recently, so up until then there would have been dangerous levels of lead in the water
Filtration. Many people have this anyway. You also get a choice about fluoride. We could also deliver drinking water from the dam but require garden watering, toilets etc to be from the tank.
- reticulated water supplied by the local council actually does work and it can be done cheaply. It's only when there are ridiculous political interferences that we end up with the situation we have now
This is a valid point, but is not a problem with tanks. My original point stands and you seem to agree with it. We don't lack water, we have an oversupply of politicians.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
You are just transferring your emissions to China anyway.
China only needs to pollute so much only to satisfy the needs of industrialized countries of cheap manufactured products.
If you want those cheap products to keep coming you will have to make some sacrifices. Such sacrifices will not necessarily tank your economy, Europeans are far less polluting and they have in several cases higher standards of living than the US or Japan.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Just look at a damn CO2 graph.
It is not until the industrial revolution that we get an exponential, never seen in the previous 600 000 years scientists have been able to document.
Honestly, to keep labouring this point is utterly ridiculous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah. It is called madness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A fellow from a town called Pompey wrote a classic treaty about this.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They have money, and do not how to spend it.
Thus they finance Citigroup, build snow pistes in the middle of the desert and buy English football teams.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Here's where junkscience.com comes from:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_Milloy
Filtration. Many people have this anyway. You also get a choice about fluoride. We could also deliver drinking water from the dam but require garden watering, toilets etc to be from the tank.
Dunno if you'll get around to reading this ...
Filtration.
Here's what I think. Reticulated water systems were introduced as away of supplying fresh, clean water cheaply to a population who were largely pretty stupid when it came to things like bacterial loads and chemical contamination.
That's why they employed smart engineers to build them. Now that the systems are in place, it's tough to scale them back.
While the intelligence of the population about these things may be better, there's enough idiots (living in the ... well, we all know which regions they live in :-) ) to make reticulated water as primary supply A Good Thing.
Add to that, it's cheap. Certainly cheaper than than a filtration system. Plus, how often will Joe Dolt change the cartridges?
Water tanks as a primary supply are a great idea if the user is a motivated user.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Now that the systems are in place, it's tough to scale them back.
No need to either. Also no need to scale it up. In the event that we didn't need as much due to increased tank capacity, presumably the excess could be used for increased power generation.
there's enough idiots (living in the ... well, we all know which regions they live in :-) ) to make reticulated water as primary supply A Good Thing.
I'm not yet convinced that changing the operation of the whole of society to make idiocy more convenient is a good thing. Perhaps idiots could apply to have reticulated water as their primary water supply in exchange for their voting rights. :-)
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Love the sig.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Here is the science to the falling sea level around the maldives: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MornerEtAl2004.pdf
Well, I don't know if you'll get around to reading this, but:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/collapse-contaminates-water/2008/11/17/1226770337911.html
Metal roofing hangs in the trees nearby the reservoir at The Gap, where the roof collapsed, contaminating the water supplies of three Brisbane suburbs.
All residents and visitors to Brisbane suburbs The Gap, Enoggera, Mt Coot-tha and parts of Keperra have been warned not to drink tap water after the collapse of the roof into a reservoir.
HA! Double HA!
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
:-)
I'll see your HA! and raise you a hypothetical:
All residents and visitors to Brisbane suburbs The Gap, Enoggera, Mt Coot-tha and parts of Keperra have been warned not to drink tap water after the collapse of the roof into a reservoir. And all their water tanks have blown away, too.
Though your suggestion appears attractive, I don't think it would be financially viable for anyone to build a reticulated water system (and keep building it, since the SE corner is expanding rapidly) without guaranteed funds coming in, and people may be a little hesitant to pay $400 a year (and more) for a water system they may never need to use. I wonder how many people would think to themselves "I have to pay about $400 a year for filters. I may as well stop that and just use town water.
I like the idea of independence from The Man, but Big Engineering also appeals to me, as it does to many slashdotters. There's just something attractive about making a Big System, hitting the Big Red Button and having it Just Work. Much more appealing than changing filter cartridges at home, fishing dead pigeons out of the water system etc.
It would have been good to have a house set up for tank and/or mains, but then a lot of things would have been a good idea. We built a house recently and I briefly considered many things like this, but dealing with a project home builder doesn't leave you much wiggle room.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."