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Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea
RawJoe writes "India and Bangladesh have argued for almost 30 years over control of a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have ended the argument for them: the island's gone. From the article: 'New Moore Island, in the Sunderbans, has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.'"
It's not Global Warming it's Global Climate change. That way, when it comes resurfaces, we can blame it again!
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I thought global warming was a myth? Darth Cheney said so.
That was when it was cold outside. Now it's warm outside, so global warming must be real. It will go back to being a myth in a few months.
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons. No one has ever said that the only way the climate can warm is due to humans burning fossil fuels. Deniers like to act as if AGW proponents have said that, however. 'Tis just a strawman.
Second, 20,000 years ago we didn't have over 100 million people living in cities near the ocean. Over the next century, these millions of people will be displaced, or the land they're on will be protected, at a cost of trillions of dollars. If we can avoid it by spending much less money, say, only one trillion dollars, it makes economic sense to do so.
Spending a trillion dollars sounds almost scary, except when you put in into context of saving several trillion dollars.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
And if it was only 2.4 inches "high", one would think that most of the day the island would be underwater anyways. I'm not an expert on tides, but I'm pretty sure they're more than 3 inches in most places.
Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, depending on how the weather has been in your local geographical area. It's THE major problem I've had with the climate change debate. The only public person I've heard who's actually tried to call people on it was Krugman over at the New York Times, who pointed out that by selecting your sample years carefully from the last 10-20 years, you can "prove" anything you want about the climate. He was arguing at the time against the anti-AGW crowd (as you might expect).
As for me, I'm inclined to think we do have some cause for concern, based on what little actual evidence I've seen from both sides of the debate. I'm by no means convinced that we have enough evidence to support one side or another. I also think we have some other very good reasons to reduce carbon emissions, including a need to reduce particulate emissions of all kinds (air pollution), reduce dependence on petroleum products (whose supplies are probably running out), reduce the "need" to colonize the Middle East (eliminate the causes of terrorism), etc.
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This is clearly *not* global warming or "rising seas" but old boring "erosion" (I know, not fun).
Consider this - less than 30 years ago India could sent paratroopers to this island's "rocky shores" (sic).
Seas were rising 2mm per year until 2000 and 5mm per year thereafter, so we are talking about a rise of 2*20 + 5 * 10 = 90 mm , less than 10cm, or for those US-residents - about 3.5 inches.
I am sorry, but something smells fishy here - a place can't be 3.5 inches above water surface and have "rocky shores" which paratroopers can walk on. Consider that a tidal range in those parts is at least a few feet, so those 3.5 inches would have to completely disappear under water once or twice a day. That would make this land a "shoal" by any maritime definition.
If this island no longer exists it is because it has been washed away, as these things often occur, especially in river deltas - perhaps after a cyclone or hurricane. Nothing to see here, move along.
You appear to have forgotten about soil erosion, which is a big problem with unconsolidated soils which are recently submerged.
And regardin edification, you can't just build stuff on disputed land. Israel does that but it only does that because the people they are oppressing can barely muster any rocks to throw at them. You don't do that to a nation which has a semblance of an army.
Local weather != global climate.
Remember, while you were shovelling 9 feet of snow, Vancouver had to truck it in for the Olympics and south Alaska was having record highs. (The usual Arctic wind that keeps those places cool got pushed south a lot.)
Admittedly, trying to justify it with everything that happens is moronic. Weather patterns are massively complex. In the end, what you have to look at is the year to year trend, and by that measure, 200X was the hottest decade on record.
Exactly the point I was about to make - even the people who reject the idea that humans are responsible for global warming admit that it's still happening. My point of view is that I'm open to be convinced, but at the moment it seems to me to be arrogance on behalf of we humans to assume we can have a significant impact, although I suspect we're contributing in a minor way. I also agree we should move to cleaner fuels and be less wasteful in general (hey, there's no reason not to hedge our bets), I think even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the earth will continue to warm and we need to start thinking of ways to live with that if tackling it is impossible. The problem is the whole topic is so clouded and has now been subverted by groups on both sides with ulterior motives, I don't know who or what to trust anymore.
So the Wikipedia (I know) says New Moore Island was never higher than two meters above the water. Oh, and that was at low tide. Was this any more than a shoal?
Are you (or the FA writer) claiming the ocean there has risen as much as more than a meter???
I call BS. In fact, I suspect it was erosion that has claimed this island. Maybe, MAYBE accelrated by a few centimeters rise in ocean level, if at all. Wind and water do just fine on their own. In fact, the island was close to, if not within, the main channel of the outlet of the Hariabhanga River. Erosion and currents probably did it in.
What a pantload. Global warming? More likely predictable current-based erosion.
New Moore Island wasn't much of an island. The river took it back.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the power that moving water has.
Water takes material from some places and piles it up in others, and it's incredibly hard to dispute with it. You might look at a sandbar that has been stable for decades, and think maybe I could shift it a bit to suit myself, or make it a little higher and have an island. Forget it. That sandbar is the result of self-organized criticality. It *looks* stable, but the individual sand grains in that sandbar are constantly changing.
My wife grew up near the ocean, and there was this semi circular reef extending from two points on the shore that comes out of the water on spring tides, when you can walk the whole thing. Many times I've surfed my kayak over that reef into the deep water inside. The reef consists of cobbles ranging from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a soccer ball. One day one of the neighborhood kids had an idea: if we breech the reef at one point, we'll be able to anchor our boats inside the reef and not have to pay for a slip or launch fees. Next low tide he had the entire neighborhood carrying rocks away from the selected point, until they'd converted the reef into a pair of breakwaters creating an artificial harbor. It was an impressive feat, but the first storm -- not even a *big* storm mind you, and you couldn't tell the spot they excavated from any other spot. There literally was no trace left of their labors.
What you'd have to do with this sunken island is create a new, artificial island using huge granite boulders like they use in breakwaters; or maybe you could set up coffer dams and build a reinforced concrete sea wall. But you have to admit that you're creating an artificial island.
The reason that India and Bangladesh are fighting over this is to establish Law of the Sea rights to the surrounding water. They are trying to evade negotiations over resource disputes by appealing to a "natural" right in artificial law. Using an uninhabited island to establish territorial sovereignty is dicey enough. Using an *artificial* island is clearly absurd.
They should just resolve the underlying dispute, instead of using legal flim-flammery.
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There's no "both sides" of the debate. There's the science, which universally points towards global warming (hell, we've even noticed that over the last forty years, migratory birds in the United States have been getting smaller, which is indicative of generally rising temperatures due to Bergmann's rule), and then there's the people with a PR department, who are busy making it look like there's a debate. Even calling it a "global warming debate" is a victory for them, because the evidence for global warming shows up everywhere.
"Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, ..."
Well, to be fair, there are idiots all over the political and ideological map. Sometimes they end up in your camp, sometimes in the other camp. You can't judge who's right by who's got more idiots on their side...
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When you only look back a couple hundred years, the global warming figures look absolutely frightening. Go back about 1000 years and it doesn't look nearly as bad. Go back about 20,000 years and you start to wonder if we should be cranking up the global furnace as fast in order to make the next Ice Age, which is inevitable and devastating, not quite so bad. On that time scale the current warming trend is insignificant and irrelivant. How do you compare a change of less than a degree over the last 150 years (which was coming out of a mini-ice age) to fluctuations of 10-20 degrees over the course of a few hundred years which is what occurs in an Ice Age?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Quite true. And I say this as someone who agrees with the ~97% of active, publishing climate scientists who accept global warming. You can't just point to something that matches one theory or another and say that it's caused by that theory. That's unscientific. That assumes that there can only be one cause for a given course of action. Another couple examples of it on the pro-warming side are Atlantic hurricanes and the Kilimanjaro glaciers. A good example on the denier side is all of the people trying to argue that a cold, snowy winter in the US means that global warming is fake -- as though US = World and "1 year's weather" = Climate. Just like weather provides a huge amount of noise atop the climate signal (in this case, due to a record North Atlantic Oscillation), sandbars form and get erased on their own. No sea level rise required.
Sea level rise is primarily a long-term threat, and primarily when compounded with storms (rather than on its own). It starts out slow but accelerates significantly over time.
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