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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.'"
If you can't play nice with your toys and share, mom will take them off you.
I say this year we nominate Global Warming for the Nobel Peace Prize for providing a peaceful solution to this heated dispute between Bangladesh and India.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's not Global Warming it's Global Climate change. That way, when it comes resurfaces, we can blame it again!
~Mekkah
"Hurry! Buy into my company's carbon credits scheme so you can keep polluting!" -Al Gore
Sea levels can't just rise in one place. They haven't risen enough to submerge islands. Period. Subsidence is to blame here.
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.
According to the article, sea level has been rising by 0.2 inches per year. This would imply a rise of about two inches since 2000. Over the previous twenty years (back to the origin of the dispute over the island), the rise would have been about 2.4 inches, using the figures in the article. So the island, at its highest point would have been less than five inches above sea level.
According to the Wikipedia entry, the "highest elevation of the island had never exceeded two meters above sea level." Which would indicate that it was at least one meter above sea level at some point, meaning that the cited increases in sea level could not have accounted for the disappearance of the island. For the quoted rise in sea level over time, it would take about 330 years for the sea to rise one meter.
Yet "oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta" said "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming." One would think that a university professor would have a slightly better grasp of the numbers than that. It helps nothing to make clearly false claims about the effects of climate change.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
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.
Since its no longer an island, but more likely to become a Coral Reef just off the surface, they'll probably call it Nothing Atoll.
If the water is still less than say 3 feet deep, crossbreed some sheep with dolphins and start farming leaping mutton!
There's lots of information available on the subsidence, via plate tectonics, of the Bay of Bengal, for exameple:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6X-4B4PWYT-1&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F02%2F2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1269324457&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=098986c85bd272474f1579b29771b39c
The islands are made of silt deposited by the river, and rise and fall depending or whether or not the river floods are depositing mud and building up islands faster than wave erosion and subsidence of the underlying plate are taking them down. The process is weather dependent, but weather is not the only significant force at work. The islands have come and gone before and will do so again.
"...stand in the way of a good ad hominem. HAHA! Al Gore's fat!"
Hey! That's not an ad hominem attack! Observe:
insult - Al Gore is fat.
ad hominem - Al Gore is wrong because he's fat.
This is a sandbar in an estuary. It first accumulated enough silt to poke above the surface back in 1974, and was never more than 2 meters high. In addition, the nearest tide gauge is showing +0.54 (+/- 0.52, heh) mm per year rise in sea level, meaning that it would have taken nearly 4000 years for the local change in sea level to have caused it to disappear.
If you insist on bringing up global warming, you have to blame the sandbar's emergence on global cooling during the 70s and notice that we are now back where we started. A much wiser choice would be to simply notice that rivers flush crap down stream, and ignore this "island" the way we ignore all the other sandbars and ephemera.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/25/bengal-island-succumbs-to-global-warming-nonsense-ap-gets-nutty-over-loss-of-a-sandbar/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Talpatti_Island
Move along, nothing to see here.
See that "Preview" button?
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.
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.
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.