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Five Solomon Islands Disappear Into The Pacific Ocean As A Result Of Climate Change (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Climate change strikes again. A paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters says five of the Solomon Islands have completely submerged underwater due to man-made climate change, and six more have experienced a dramatic reduction in shoreline. The Solomon Islands has a population of a little more than 500,000 people, many of whom have been adversely affected by rising sea levels in recent years. NASA scientist James Hansen estimated that seas could rise by seven meters within the next century. In 2014, Losing Ground issued a report that shows how large areas of the Louisiana coastline are being lost to rising sea levels. A 2011 study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey determined that the state's wetlands were being lost at a rate of "a football field per hour." Michael Edison Hayden writes from ABC News, "The Solomon Islands provides a preview of how sea-level rise could affect other coastal communities in the coming years, according to the study, largely because the speed which erosion is taking place has been accelerated by a "synergistic interaction" with the waves that surround it.
Wave driven erosion can be dramatically accelerated by a small rise in water level. Were these islands on their way out anyway? Maybe not, if sea level were moving in the other direction.
I think the idea is that it's a tax, which goes into a fund to ameliorate climate change effects. Doesn't help the oil companies (unless you count preventing them from being sued for climate change because it's now out of their hands). Sucks for energy availability to the poor though. I wonder what fifty years of suffering through that would do to our infrastructure though. Mass deaths? Cheap and ubiquitous mass transit and subsidized heat efficiency improvements to housing?
The erosion in coastal Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River *is* man-made, but not attributable to climate change.
As the Mississippi river was "controlled" for flood prevention and shipping, less and less sediment from upstream flooding and erosion has been available to replenish the delta at the river outflow. That is why the coast is eroding
Did you look at the EPA graph? I'm being waaaaayyyy too generous when I make it sound like AGW sea level rise-to-date could be as much as 25 cm.
The rate of rise was astonishingly constant from the beginning of the record in 1880 (allegedly ~70 years before man-made warming became meaningful), up until about 2000.
There is a small bump at the end representing approximately the last seven years. The size of that bump? About 2 cm. (Also, the bump is shrinking now and was never there to begin with in the satellite record; it's only present in the tide gauge data. There's a good chance it's just noise.)
The average annual sea level rise prior to the bump was about 0.15 cm, meaning that the bump accelerated the inevitable natural end of the "islands" by less than twenty years, even if you want to blame a non-linear increase in wave erosion. Colour me unimpressed, seeing as real islands generally don't have expiration dates that are humanly relevant, at all.
The point is, that if the land was at such low elevation, or so fragile, that it could be submerged or destroyed by a tiny rise in sea level (probably more like 2 cm, than 25 cm), there is no way that anyone can assert a definitive cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 emissions and the islands disappearing. There is a high probability that it was going to disappear anyway, even without the extra 2 (or if you insist, 25) cm.
Australia briefly introduced a carbon tax, some of which went to the poor and elderly whose portion of daily living costs towards energy was so significant that their quality of live would be significantly effected. Carbon emissions went down and the economy was stimulated by R&D in high-tech renewable energy - solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
The situation, of course, did not last long. Rupert Murdoch and his friends went hard against it in the media. When laws forced them to provide balanced points of view, social engineering was used - flooding the comments section with "anonymous" contrarian opinions and "misinformed" data. They got their preferred oil-interest backed party back into power, who, it seems, successfully argued that wind-mills are utterly offensive while coal is as good for humanity today, as it was at the start of the industrial revolution.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Until recently, I was your typical far-right climate change skeptic. After seeing for myself the changes in places I once lived, speaking with people from around the world who have seen the changes first hand, evaluating the data for myself (I'm a healthy skeptic).
What's not being discussed is Africa. The water shortage in Africa is becoming a real problem. Wars are on the verge of happening because of water shortages. I lived on a certain island for years, and as a child, it never got above 80 in the summer or below 40 in the winter. Now? Routinely over 90 in the summer, with the warmer months three months longer. The people there are losing flora, the animals are having issues dealing with the newer temperatures since the mid-late 80s. It's real. Things like this are happening all over the world. The Pacific Ocean is losing it's oxygen levels because of the rise in sea temperatures. This is starting to happen in the southern Atlantic, which in turn affects the Gulf Stream, which affects fishing, currents, people's lives.
I have now read the entire paper. It is true that it does not ever directly attribute the sea level rise in the Solomon Islands to AGW. (The linked ABC news article does though - surely the scientists will be publicly denouncing the media's gross distortion of their claims any minute now... ?)
On the other hand, the premise of the paper is that sea level rise is responsible for significant loss of land area in the Solomon Islands (and the authors worked very hard to connect sea level rise to AGW at every opportunity, even though they didn't quite come out and say that AGW has actually caused any sea level rise yet).
That's a problem, because nowhere in their paper (that I could find, anyway) do they actually offer any evidence that the local sea level rise experienced by the Solomon Islands contributed meaningfully to the loss. They point out several other factors that likely dominated, one of which was erosion by wave action. They then attempt to connect this back to AGW with the following statement:
Wave energy can interact synergistically with localised sea-level rise (through changing wave refraction dynamics and more wave energy propagating across reef crest onto the coast) to exacerbate coastal erosion (Storlazzi et al 2015) and thus may be a key driver of the rapid coastal recession in the Solomon Islands. Further work is required to determine the relative importance of extreme wave events or incremental changes in incident wave energy and their interactions with sea-level on shoreline dynamics of islands.
Notice the operative words there: "can", "may be", and "further work is required". They don't actually have anything to say on the subject - that is, on the causal connection between sea level rise and increased wave erosion - other than "maybe you should read these other guys' papers" and "give us money and we'll write something too". But, they decided to name their paper after it anyway, and the media ran with it.
The main actual content of the study - once all of the background material and discussion is filtered out - is basically just:
1) Some statistics about the rates of erosion and accretion on various islands in the Central Pacific, including the Solomon Islands.
2) More statistics about the atmospheric and oceanic conditions over time around those islands - much of which was extrapolated, not measured.
3) A few anecdotes about communities that need to relocate - all of whom, from the sound of it, were in poor locations to begin with.
As someone else pointed out, the last graph clearly shows (if you know how to read the axes, anyway), that there was a net increase in land area for the islands chains studied; the authors simply chose to focus upon a specific few tiny islands that shrank.
Check out the last graph in the original paper. It shows (pay attention to the axes) that the Central Pacific island chains studied, as a group, increased significantly in land area.
However, the Solomon Islands, specifically, may be an exception to that. (I'd need the raw data to tell for sure; the net change is close enough to zero that I can't just eyeball it from the graph.)
In any case, the specific islands which are the main focus of the paper were all tiny (the largest was only 0.25 (km)^2) and not at all representative of the Solomon Islands as a whole. They were selected for further scrutiny specifically because they were eroding quickly; in a chain with hundreds of islands, there were bound to be at least a few getting smaller.
Ugh, another goon who gets all of their news from the internet. Gasoline is a futures market; by the time it hits the retailers storage tank what they paid for it is so far removed from the current market price that is almost no correlation with crude oil. Yet if you looked at the prices side by side historically they appear to be tied together even though it takes a refinery two to three weeks to break a barrel of crude into useful products. That is because you are not being charged based on what it cost the gas station to get what they have. You are being charged based on what it would cost the station to replace that amount if they had to purchase it again that same day. Think about it, how often do you see the price of gasoline change at a station? Like eight to ten times a week? How often do you think that delivery truck stops by to fill the tanks, maybe once a week give or take based on location? Don't get me wrong, gas isn't some power house profit center. I am all too aware that it cannot compete with the kind of markup you get with coffee, energy drinks or junk food. But the crap about them only making one cent on each gallon was basically propaganda so that red necks would stop torching gas stations.
Why are we talking about gasoline and oil company profits anyway? Although the demand will always be there, gas is not, was not and has never been the most profitable part of a barrel of oil in terms of profit per unit of input. It's almost regarded as a waste product, and you see this periodically when refineries need to make room for other products and so they flood the market; name one other commodity that behaves like that. Oil companies will make literally any other product they can rather than waste it on producing gas.
The more I think about this thread the more it bugs me. Why did my post get five points? It's not because it's especially insightful. It's because I crafted the post to score points. I made it short. I phrased it so it was slightly confrontational. And, I left out the answer I would like to have given:
Whether the tax reflects the government's contribution to delivering fuel is irrelevant. In many parts of the country people have voted to impose taxes on themselves to cover the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure. That is not gouging. That's taxation WITH representation.
But the post that gave that answer was too long and too late. It's buried in this thread having garnered a single point.
We are living in an age where people are persuaded by tiny bits of information. We don't take the time to consider nuances. We don't think through complex problems. We just toss little arguments back and forth to score popularity points.
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