Slashdot Mirror
Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting
Hugh Pickens writes "The president of the Maldives and 11 ministers, decked out in scuba gear, held a cabinet meeting 4m underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation. While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century. President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet spent half an hour on the sea bed, communicating with white boards and hand signals and signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. The Maldives has already begun to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees. Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore. 'We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked,' he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers. 'If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world.'"
No amount of CO2 cutbacks is going to stop climate change and the sea levels rising, even if CO2 emissions dropped to zero tomorrow. The relevant time constants are from hundreds to thousands of years.
This pretty much highlights how it's all primarily a media circus and political game. The science is lost entirely in the noise.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
LOL i wish i could mod you funny. I say we give them some of Israel
While one can feel sorry for the citizens of the Maldives, the simple fact is that it isn't very good long term planning to build permanent domiciles in a place which is 1.5 meters above what the water surface is at the moment. In many places that might leave you with your house submerged after a heavy rainfall.
They've been living there quite happily for roughly 2000 years; I'd call that doing okay in the long term. Rainfall isn't really a problem, because, see, these are islands, and rain sort of goes down into the ocean. There's no hurricane season, so that's not much of an issue to my knowledge. The occasional tsunami is devastating, but the trade-off is easy access to shipping, a forgiving climate, and lots of seafood, which to many is worth the risk.
In that light I'm not sure it's appropriate to regard it as lost revenue, but rather a limited time opportunity which can and has been exploited.
Can't disagree with you there, except inasmuch as saying it "has been" exploited. Oceans are rising at about 3 mm/year, so while there's cause for concern and planning, I don't think they need to evacuate just yet. As noted in the summary, they're quite wisely diversifying their investment by trying to buy an emergency backup homeland.