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How To Lead a Nation That's About To Be Swallowed By the Sea
merbs writes: Anote Tong, the president of low-lying Kiribati, has spent nearly a decade trying to save his people from rising sea levels. There's a good chance he will not succeed. This is how he leads a nation that will likely not exist in 100 years. Motherboard reports: "Kiribati’s fate provides a rare glimpse of the future world under climate change. The tiny island nation is the canary in our global coal mine, and it will bear the brunt of climate change more intensely and much sooner than nearly anywhere else. 'We cannot keep doing what we are doing,' Tong said. 'Because we may be on the front line today, but other countries, other societies, other communities will be next.'"
hey, it worked in the movies.
make it someone else's problem
I hear some of these low-lying nations are spending what money they have to buy land in other countries... so they can pick up their people and move there. I guess they're also buying agreements to take on their citizens, but that'll be kind of hard to enforce, eh? Without a country or anything, that is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They will save the day. Always do. Almost.
Yours,
Gabe Kaplan
It is not the first time a population has to move because of adverse climate effects. It happened all the time through the history of humanity. The only thing different here, is someone believes we can avoid this by some actions because this is caused by our own actions. As far as I know, no one has proven yet this is actually possible. Our climatic models are overfitting the data and are then poor at predicting the future.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Vice is propaganda. Thanks
Well it still doesn't affect "us" directly so Climate change is still just a myth, obviously. /s
Throughout the history of the Earth, its crust has constantly been recycled. Areas once above the ground and above the sea have descended downward and have been replaced with new land. This will continue to occur. Just as Kiribati and the Maldives are descending into the sea, other islands are being born by volcanoes. The Himalayas were once under water, including the peaks of mountains like Everest, at the bottom of the Tethys Ocean. Sea levels have risen and dropped by over 100 meters in the past. There's evidence that sea level was about 120 meters lower in the last ice age. All of these things have occurred many times in the Earth's past, sometimes rapidly like at the end of the last ice age. I fail to see why things that have occurred naturally throughout the entirety of the Earth's history are a problem. Who cares if Kiribati goes under water? There's plenty of land being created elsewhere on Earth.
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island I
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island II
Spot the clear blub blub trend, Try hard. ~1mm rise per year. Maybe.
Meanwhile a typhoon could arrive next year with a 8 foot storm surge that swamps the atolls completely.
DISCLAIMER: Grew up in the Caribbean, nailed doors shut from the inside and held on tight for Hugo and Marilyn. People died. '~1mm/yr climate refugees' on a coral atoll really sound like whiny scammers to me. In terms of threat level it's like that movie, Frogs.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I guess Caligula had it right, he was just 2000 years ahead of his time.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The images are very powerful in that CNN interview. It's very disheartening to see how vulnerable we are not to big disasters, but to the wreck the slowly moving sea brings everyday when the tide gets high to crops and fresh water sources. May you find a way to deal with this!
1. Ask for help... from the Netherlands. They know a thing or two about living underwater... and being stubborn enough to not move. Or join forces with other islands (Tuvalu?) to make a more powerful group and achieve better negotiations (with the UN?).
2. Don't fight the water, but rather welcome it:
2.1. Underwater houses, grown like corals (there's even an animation about that!). You just leave the lower levels once they get underwater. If you're smart, useful structures could be moved upward as water rises.
2.2. Really live underwater... learn how to make waterproof houses.
2.3 Create underwater hotels and make money to reinvest in more underwater hotels and business centers.
2.4. Make it research on adapting humans to new environments and get funding from universities. Make it an international project to get help even from children. All help counts; perhaps some kind of opensource or collaboration effort might help.
2.5. Fish farming might become easy and the world certainly needs fish.
3. Become Waterworld(TM): floating artificial islands! Or palafittes! I see you're on the Pacific... can you get all that plastic that's floating over there and recycle it? That would be cheap. Or countries could send you the plastic they own for recycling.
4. Make international agreements while you can. For instance, seek participation of near countries in your projects to recover from sea level rising, as knowledge from that will probably benefit them somehow and lessen the need to receive refugees.
Some things which are good/not so good:
1. You got time: defend against the sea rise of few centimeters, not by building a 5 meter wall / Sea storms can make 5 meter waves _now_.
2. Protect some land now and recover it piece by piece in the years to come / People will need to learn to live in buildings in a small area.
3. You were always vulnerable to tsunamis etc. (IOW, your situation is not that worse now). / High tide will suck more.
These are just a few lines, made in a hurry. You need to have a lot more to find something that will really be helpful...
"it will bear the brunt of climate change more intensely and much sooner than nearly anywhere else"
The sea levels cannot be rising more at one point than at other points. Eat it up, suckers!
First: Any land that borders on the sea and is neither on a fault line where upthrusting occurs nor atop a hotspot that produces volcanoes (like the Hawaiian islands) will slump into the sea. No exotic conspiracy by evil rich nations pumping out CO2 is required, only tidal actions and normal wave activity.
Second: Anything Bill Maher (Vice) is pushing is just left win claptrap that's as credible as an ISIS recruiting campaign promising 72 virgins to anybody who blows himself up. Both are equally accountable for their statements.
a tiny island nation that has just over 100,000 citizens with around 25% living below the poverty line and the rest not much further above it. Relocate them and move on. Their president has already claimed its too late to do anything to save Kiribati, so why worry about an inconsequential speck in the Pacific ocean?
We just had this topic a few days ago. Are these stories supposed to convince us that billions of people around the world should give up on affordable energy for the convenience of thousands living on Pacific atolls? Does India owe it to Kiribati to keep the Indian people artificially poor for another half century until non-carbon energy is cheap enough?
If not, then what's the point? "Kiribati leaders feel sad about what they think will happen in 50 years"? Lots of people who tell themselves sad stories (whether true, false, or unknown) about the future feel sad about it.
Without Kiribati, Gillespie will have to move his Amelia Earhart search/scam to another island...
Sure, when you live on an island barely six feet above sea level, passing hurricanes have threatened (and have succeeded in the past) to wipe these islands clean. But the threat of sea level changes, which have been slowly rising since the last Ice Age, is moot because, in recent times, most of these Pacific atolls have grown in size, due to increasing biomass of growing coral.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
Cutting emissions, IMHO, will have no observable effect on these islands. But I can't blame the natives, though, for trying to get the rich nations of the world to give them free transport to higher and safer havens.
First of all:
1) Climate Change is a natural response to the Earth's ability to support life.To thwart the Earths ability to prevent or adapt either through increasing the surface area of the oceans as compared to land, or through geoengineering projects more than likely will destroy the biosphere.
Contrary to what these scientists will tell you, shining a heat lamp on a beaker filled with CO2, although a useful experiment, is not exactly the same as a 4 billion year old Biosphere, created through wholly unknown means and unknown processes.
So predicting a outcome through any purposeful change would be highly reckless and it is beyond our ability now, and more than likely a thousand years from now.
Yes, the earth really is that complicated I am afraid than that beaker of CO2.
So what can we do in the mean time?
2) One thing we CAN do is divorce ourselves gradually over time from the environment. We would do that by building structures in orbit in the future, but right now, we have all the tools to do something far more practical: Create and build archologies on the surface or underwater.
Since human beings are sort of picky about their environments anyway, to provide our own air, recycling and power systems to grow food in a closed loop from outside the environment is something which our current engineering systems can solve.
No need to experiment with the environment outside, and much more useful than carbon taxes which do absolutely nothing but make problems worse by removing the financial benefits of climate change for building real solutions like the above.
A great way to test this out would be to build an archology on the island and move everyone into it. Depending on what the culture produces or decides, they could allow the archology to float or stay fixed.
It would represent a really valuable experiment to see what the details we would need to solve to make that happen.
It would also produce and refine the timelines on some technology we desperately need like Thorium reactor technology and Hydroponic farming on large scales.
And of course most of the industrial automation of the systems would be a HUGE project to make a distro of LINUX to handle. :-)
Call it Archology LINUX. All the software you need to run a archology! :-)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the Kiribati, because that's all they're gonna get and I ain't fucking giving up my giant SUV. No way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
These VOLCANIC islands, have been coming and going long before man was on this planet. The oceans change, the climate changes, only a fool that doesn't understand how the globe & sun work would think something as small as man can have an impact on our global climate. This whole global warming crap is just another way to frighten the uneducated, to give up more rights, freedoms & security to the "new world order" one world government, united nations. Take away more money from the producers and give it to the non producers. Make everyone miserable (except the super wealthy & dictator types).
For those that believe that climate change is a liberal conspiracy to keep India poor, this is an excellent opportunity to buy out an entire country from a motivated seller.
Choose what to keep and build up. Their real problem is their inaccessibility and their failure to spin that as 'exclusivity'. They need a marketing guy and an invasion of rich people and pretenders in order to have the revenue needed to use their existing islands as the future foundations of some of the worlds most exclusive resorts.
Bangkok won't be around in 60. But there's an endless supply of suckers to buy hastily built condos. And let's not even get into New Orleans ...
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Their island was sunk... by a Confederate submarine. BOOM! Glug, glug, glug.
Sometimes islands are created, sometimes they're destroyed. Such is the course of nature. Ocean levels rise and ocean levels fall, over the course of millennia.
Adapt and survive, or don't. Personally, I'll be too busy worrying about my own little corner of the world to care.
Liberty caused climate change. Therefore, target liberty
This message was sponsored by Karl Martell. EDUCATE YOURSELF.
London, Paris, Poland, Banana, Church
Dykes? Since when do lesbians hold back the sea?
Half my country is below sea level. Do you hear us whine about it? Ffs, get off your ass and build a dike already.
If the island will be uninhabitable in 100 years, when the global water level, if trends continue, will be 1 foot higher, then that pretty much means it is uninhabitable now. Get out now while you still can.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'd give them 10 max.
The gas I've been burning should count for something.
Would they be able to take any sort of action in any of the world courts? I know the countries who are (arguably) most responsible for climate change are often the ones denying any link between man and global warming. But the rest of the world seems to, in large part, support the theory that mankind's actions are causing the increase in global temperatures. Because of that could the "denying" countries be overruled in the courts by all of the countries that do believe in the link? And would the fact that some of the denying countries (and others) just had a major summit to discuss steps that each country agrees to take to fight climate change count as some sort of evidence that there is acknowledgement that mankind is involved?
Bark less. Wag more.
The solution is simple.
Have all citizens become Republican climate change deniers. That will keep the floods away quite effectively.
Perhaps Mr. Trump can assist after he loses the US election, as he's the Republican front runner here, and tells us he is the most intelligent.
Make up a bullshit Global Warming disaster and tell them it's all their fault.
They hold back the C because they know immediately after will come the D, which they want no part of.
Build a new Mount Trashmore.
Filthy dutch...
Move the @*#& inland. What happens ift he sea rises due to natural causes and there is nobody to blame?
I love reading stories about half-wits who think the sky is falling.
Bangladesh hasn't really passed by Feudalism, and doesn't seem to want to. It seems to be more in the market to go full Islamic theocracy, with no room for any other worldview.
Kiribati has had an overpopulation problem since 1988 and that is more relevant to their problems than climate change, except they can't blame other people for their fecundity.
Actually this was (sort of) what has already happened, not with rising sea levels but with volcanic eruption which made the island of Montserrat largely uninhabitable in 1995. As a British Overseas territory it became the UK's problem to evacuate and house the inhabitants. However Kiribati became fully independent from the UK in 1979 so they are unlikely to be able to make it someone else's problem quite so easily.
Regardless of beliefs of climate change, a recent report on the Antartic ice suggested a more likely culprit to rising sea levels than ice melting is actually ground water. I.e. Humans numbering in their billions sucking water out of the ground aka California, where it mostky ends up at sea. I am pretty sure we are not ready to limit the population of earth, so I am guessing sooner or later we are going to have to adjust to a changing earth whether we like it or not.
The reefs are dynamic structures that will adjust to rising sea levels.
Climate change is a populist lefty idea to avoid actual problems, such as an ideology that declares war on all other ideologies.
The real question is, how to explain to a rabid bunch of hard-core Athiests, who are a minority, that their assumptions about Islams are wrong?
1. Religious Freedom “Whoever changes his (Islamic) religion – kill him” (Bukhari 84:57) Muslims are not free to leave their faith, to determine their own beliefs. This would put them under threat of death, on the charge of Apostasy, and are most likely to be executed by close friends or relatives. In order to actually be a “free country”, we have a duty of care to support the apostate Muslim, and to confront this Islamic teaching in truth and arms.
2. Forbidden Friendship “If you are friends with unbelievers, you are one of them” (5.51, 3.118 , 4.89, 5.80, 3.28, 9.23, 53.29, 3.85, 3.10; Ishaq 252, 262; Bukhari 59:572) There is no such thing as a “Muslim friend”. According to Islamic teaching, if they are your friend, then they are not Muslim. Stealing from non-Muslims is not a crime in Islam – (8.69, 48.20, 33.27; Ibn Ishaq 327, 503, 764; Bukhari 44.668)
3. Religious Violence “Fighting is obligatory, as much as you dislike it” (2.216, 4.76) “When you meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks” (47:4) “Strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers”(3.151) “Fight against people till they declare that there is no god but Allah” (2.193, 8.39, 9.73, 9.123, 66.9, 9.5, 2.98) To combat religious violence, we must have the courage to confront the source. Our culture (from Matt 10.14) insists: you can have an opinion and share it (free speech), but you cannot force it upon others (freedom of religion). The Christian and Muslim viewpoints presented here are irreconcilable.
4. Abrogation (Naskh/Takfir) Peaceful verses from Mohammed’s early have been completely replaced with far more violent verses from his later life, most notably with chapter 9, the Sura of the Sword. Those peaceful verses now only serve to deceive people about Islam, which is intent on global conquest.
5. Deception “War is Deception” (Bukhari 52:269, 49:857, 50:369, 84:64-65; Quran 16.19, 3:28, 40:28, 3.54) Islam defines three different types of deception Taqiyya, Kitman, Maruna, to hide their true intentions. As a consequence, Islamic sources of information are not reliable. Fortunately we live in the information age, and there are plenty of good sources of information. Examples: answering-islam.org, wikiislam.net, threligionofpeace.com, jihadwatch.org, shoebat.com, pamelageller.com
6. Rape Culture, Slavery Islamic State: "Enslaving the families of the kuffar (the infidels) and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of Shariah law". “It is permissible to rape a captive woman. Her marriage is abrogated”. (4:24, 33:50, 4.3; Muslim 3371; Salik 9.13) 33:50 - "Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty." 23:5 - "... except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them:..." Muhammad had sexual relations with Mariyah, his Coptic slave. Mariyah and her sister, Sirin were slaves, given as gifts to Muhammad. Muhammad gave Sirin to Hasan Thabit, the poet. Vol. 5-#512 Narrated Anas: ".....The prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives...." #3499, 3500- "The contractual obligation of a slave is three days. If he finds defect in the slave within three days, he may return it without any evidence; One example set by Mohummed (Hadith) concerned a male slave, who had been sexually abused by his master, and had escaped. He made an appeal to the Prophet Mohammad, who responded by enslaving him again, and returning him to his master, implying endorsement of both the slavery, and
Hollywood movies are made beliefs
The Bible, on the other hands, have billions of people taking oath with it!
A character from the Bible, Moses, reportedly can create a pathway in the middle of the sea
Since that dude is so powerful I don't see why they can't invite Moses to do some of his jingo-jango and create dry land from the sea floor!
Yes, that's the argument some people make when homes are being threatened by wildfires. So, if that is a valid argument, then one must make the same case for the people of Kiribati if one is to be consistent in their thinking.
a nation that will likely not exist in 100 years
Why would some water (even if the flooding happens) cause a nation not to exist? Maybe the land will be below the sea level, but the whole nation? The people have several years to move.
(Poland hasn't existed as a country for >100 years, but survived as a nation)
Marge, kids, everything's gonna be just fine. Now go upstairs, pack your bags. We're gonna start a new life under the sea.
Moses (mentioned earlier above), Pharaoh, and Noah.
Noah was a invitation only event.
Pharaoh was unsuccessful versus Moses.
To his credit, Pharaoh only sent his army.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT