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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.
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.
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.