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.'"

Comments

Cue the puns...

[SigILL]

Apparently they were under a lot of pressure.

Re:Cue the puns...

[Quothz]

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.

Yeah, Um, Maldives...

[Greyfox]

No one's listening, OK. Perhaps you might considering enriching uranium instead. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. You words might have more urgency if they were backed by NUCLEAR FORCE. That's all I'm saying...

Re:Yeah, Um, Maldives...

[Greyfox]

Sorry I meant people who could actually do something about the problem. I'm not convinced that anyone they've talked to thus far can, anyway. To be perfectly serious for a moment, it would be a bad idea for Maldives to rely on anyone else to solve this problem or to prevent the potential catastrophe they're facing. The whole "We're going to buy as a new homeland" thing is a good start, but they're talking about moving a nation of people and it's possibly only a couple of decades before things start going downhill.

Have they even scoped out a new homeland yet? If not, may I suggest Utah? No one's using it at the moment, if my last drive through there is any indication...

underwater cabinet? Sounds familiar...

[Tumbleweed]

Davey Jones' Locker?

CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[Morgaine]

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.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[omfgnosis]

Are you suggesting that it's an entirely non-man-made catastrophe, which was in the works long before industrialism? If so, got any citations to back that up? If not, will you clarify?

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[DiamondGeezer]

No, I think he's suggesting that there is no catastrophe. The Maldives are 1 metre above sea-level because they are coral atolls. When the sea-levels rise (as they have done in the past, the coral simply grows upwards - when the sea-level falls, the coral erodes, leaving them constantly about a metre above sea-level.

Its the same with coral atolls everywhere.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[MrMr]

extra tree growth (which will come to haunt us later when those trees decay and the limit of extra tree growth caused by higher CO2 levels is reached)
You're right! lets cut down all the rain forests to prevent that disaster from happening.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[KeensMustard]

It is certainly true that climate change due to anthropogenic causes is now inevitable - it's already happening, and, as you say, even if we went straight to zero (net) emissions, the imbalance we have created will take a long time to rebalance. The temperature has already risen by 0.75 degrees - 2 degrees is in the zone which scientists call 'dangerous' climate change - we are nearly half way there already. However, drastic cutbacks in our emissions are inevitable. Option 1 is to make those cutbacks now. Under this option, we avoid what is euphemistically called 'the worst' of climate change. There is still damage to the global economy, but it is minimised. Option 2 is to not make those changes based on some ridiculous premise. Under this strategy, we will need to mitigate the effects, that is 'adapt' -adaption is much, much more expensive than mitigation. Inevitably, the cost will be such that industry, commerce and agriculture are reduced, as is personal finance to purchase fuel etc. These reductions will forcibly reduce our emissions. The options are - pay a little now, pay a LOT later.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[Temporal]

Your source sucks.

Here's a better one.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[drinkypoo]

The catastrophe is not for nature, it's for man.

P.S. Corals worldwide are dying. The two culprits fingered so far are rising oceanic acidity (caused by excessive atmospheric CO2 being gas-exchang'd right into the ocean) and human herpes simplex viruses, which apparently kill off some of the important organisms responsible for helping to build and maintain coral.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[martinX]

And no-one has considered that fishing with explosives or cyanide on coral reefs could be causing a problem? Interesting.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[Temporal]

Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.

Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[nadaou]

yeah, it's better if we do nothing but get really drunk and mock the folks who are trying to do something to save your sorry ass.

It's the can-do attitude which made America what it is today!

We may not be able to alter the momentum for 50 years from now at this point, but we can do a lot to affect it 500 years from now, probably no less than saving civilization in the process. One thing is for sure, if you never try you'll never achieve anything.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[nadaou]

also temperature shocks (like 1998 el nino) make the coral symbiosis into a parasitic situation and now-harmful zoanthids are expelled from the structure leading to "bleached coral sydrome". This dead coral has nothing to repair the small cracks & so breaks up after the next year or two of storms.

Basically the coral can't adapt fast enough and it may be 1000 years before it's back on track. By which time it has sunk far enough below the exponential decay of underwater sunlight not to regenerate back up to the surface with any great pace. Wave energy probably doesn't get below 100m depth, while the smallest amount of sunlight may make it down that far, so there is some hope for eventual regeneration.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[newhoggy]

Corals grow within very narrow limits of temperature, irradiance, salinity, pH and turbidity; all variables which are influenced by climate and weather. More CO2 means more acidic ocean water, which would retard coral growth. Warmer oceans would also reduce carbonate ion saturation, having the same effect.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[drinkypoo]

The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline.

The car is not going slower, it's going 200 mph! Or in other words, you're an ass. Is this the kind of thing you bring up in ordinary conversation? You must be a hit at parties. I'd hit you twice.

You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference;

This is extremely disingenuous. It's the same retarded argument as "even though we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we put out ten times more CO2 than volcanism every year, and we know volcanism to be a major driver of global CO2, we don't believe that there is a greenhouse effect, and by the way global temperatures have only risen a little over one degree, that's a tiny shift!" But it's a fucking stupid statement because 99% of everything interesting on the planet occurs in a narrow temperature range, and by the same token, the ocean functions in a very small Ph range.

in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease,

You are either ignorant or outright lying, since we know that small shifts in Ph have severe ramifications for much ocean life, including all marine mammals, and especially including coral reefs (where most of the ocean's diversity is) and algae (where most of the world's oxygen comes from.) Why don't you stop spreading the lies of the deniers? We're not even in Egypt... although, come to mention it, have you seen the Nile?

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[smoker2]

While coral does grow like that, upwards in times of higher sea level, they are unable to do so unless the atoll is covered with water. Coral grows on top of an existing coral base, not from the base. There are islands in the West Indies that have coral terraces gaining heights of 60 or 70 meters above sea level. They are not being pushed up, the sea level has dropped by that much since the first (top level) terrace was formed. Kind of puts things in perspective, i.e. how low sea level actually is today.

Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change

[Martin Blank]

There is no link that says that we put out 10 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, because that statement is wrong, but not in the way that you think. The difference is much, much higher.

A 1991 study[1] put the annual volcanic contribution of atmospheric CO2 at 4E12 mol/year, or 176 million tons. Annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are around 27 billion metric tons; the US power industry alone produces more than 2.4 billion tons.[2] The factor between worldwide volcanic and human emissions of CO2 is actually around 150.

[1] Gerlach, T.M., 1991, Present-day CO2 emissions from volcanoes: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (EOS))
[2] http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html

New homeland?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should totally pick the Middle East. Lots of land, friendly people...

Re:New homeland?

[adamchou]

LOL i wish i could mod you funny. I say we give them some of Israel

really because venice is fucking underwater

[Anonymous Coward]

i guess its gods punishment for being them being gay? or european? or something.

Re:Well, good for them.

[DiamondGeezer]

That's right. But a lot of the Netherlands is below sea level whereas the Maldives are above sea-level. So who has most to fear?

Around 1970 the sea level dropped by 20-30 cms and since then there has been no sea-level rise: http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/inqu/finalprogram/abstract_54486.htm

But don't let scientific and historical facts get in the way of a good piece of hysteria.

Don't worry

[turing_m]

Darling it's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me.

Re:Well, good for them.

[Sique]

Just to give you a better picture: Less than 5% of all Dutch people live within walking distance to the coast, but all of the Maledivians do. The largest island is Malé, with just about a square mile (2.7 sq km). So while 95% of all Netherlands can hide behind several layers of dikes, none of the Maledivians can. Or for some other numbers: The whole of the Maledives covers 298 sq km of land, stretched over 823 km x 150 km of ocean, completely different than the Netherlands with more than 41000 sq km of land stretched over 360 km x 280 km.

The whole length of the Dutch dikes is about 3000 km, so if we estimate that an average dike is 30 m wide, a similar construction would amount to 30% of the whole maledives used for the dikes, while less than 0,25% of the Netherlands are actual dikes.

No sympathy here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no sympathy for a country that forces its people to convert to islam and subjects almost 1/3 of the population to a form of serfdom. In addition if you are not a muslim and a native then you are either executed, imprisoned or expelled. Finally the country is extremely racist when it comes to non-muslims. I've had the unfortunate pleasure of being sent to the main island a few times for work. While the country is very pretty the people are not with the exception of the lowly peasants.

Sea level has NOT been rising

[Eukariote]

The following interview Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedisch expert on sea-level geophysics, explains how the data has been misrepresented to feed the global warming scare http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf. The reality is that little has happened to the sea level over the past decades.

Photo Gallery

[gaanagaa]

Photo Gallery http://surl.me/2c67 (Flickr)