Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.'"
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 doubt anyone believes than anything can be reversed in time to help that particular country.
There's plenty of proof that human actions can dramatically alter our environment. Just look at the Aral sea for example.
Personally I believe we should be acting on the best scientific information we have. It's not perfect and we are learning more all the time, but institutions like NASA have sent probes to then ends of the solar system, have landed a rover on Mars, and returned people from space. I trust them more when it comes to understanding our atmosphere and what can have long term impacts on the climate than I do the Koch brothers.
I guess Caligula had it right, he was just 2000 years ahead of his time.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I believe we should be acting on the best scientific information we have.
I couldn't agree more. We should act on scientific information, not the politics of wealth and not the politics of guilt. And the science should itself remain independent and untainted by politics (otherwise it isn't really science).
I am willing to accept whatever unbiased science tells me. If I don't like that answer, too bad for me. It is what it is.
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.
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.
There's a vacant house across the street form me in Wisconsin.
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.
Make up a bullshit Global Warming disaster and tell them it's all their fault.
I believe humans are changing the climate. I also believe global warming is being leveraged as a political excuse for much more localized man-made problems. Every year at the UN we hear the same tired sob stories from heads of states blaming the obvious gross mismanagement of their own lands on "climate change".
I'm all for crunching complex models in gigantic computers as long as outputs include error bars and make useful predictions. I just wish people would find a way to disconnect science from the political questions about what if anything to do about it. There are plenty of people on both sides spewing bullshit for political advantage.
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.
It's worse than that. Actual measurements show the islands are growing not shrinking.
It's all just an attempt to extort money based on lies.
However the bleeding hearts just never bother to do any actual research.. They just want to feel self important by 'supporting the cause'.
That's actually true - but still a bold-faced lie by omission:
"Et tu, Brute?"
A sealevel rise of 1 to 3 millimetres per year isn't going to inundate anything for millennia.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds