Slashdot Mirror
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.
How about just pricing fossil fuels to take into account extant and future climate change, and then let the market find the solution? Is the market capable of finding solutions to finite and/or expensive resources or not?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...five of the Solomon Islands have completely submerged underwater due to man-made climate change...
That's a bold-faced lie. The total global sea level rise since 1880 is less than 25 cm (10 inches), according to the EPA. The natural tidal range of the oceans is of the order of one metre (several feet). Any island that has "submerged" during that time period did so primarily because of other factors, such as the ground subsiding, or erosion driven by the wind and the waves.
This is especially obvious when you consider that anthropogenic global warming is not believed to have reached significant levels until around 1950 (if then).
As for houses washing away and such - any land that can be "submerged" solely by a sea level change of 25 cm was already getting scoured regularly by waves, storm surges, etc.
Not climate change.
"Ten houses from one island were washed away at sea between 2011 and 2014"
Oddly enough, the Solomon Islands were struck by Tropical Cyclone Freda in 2012. What a coincidence. And they've lost five low-lying reef islands in the last 70 or so years. Out of ten THOUSAND islands in the Solomons.
Here's part of the paper's abstract:555
"Using time series aerial and satellite imagery from 1947 to 2014 of 33 islands, along with historical insight from local
knowledge, we have identified five vegetated reef islands that have vanished over this time period and a
further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has
destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. Rates of
shoreline recession are substantially higher in areas exposed to high wave energy, indicating a
synergistic interaction between sea-level rise and waves. Understanding these local factors that
increase the susceptibility of islands to coastal erosion is critical to guide adaptation responses for these
remote Pacific communities."
Actual story: "People built houses near the beach on islands that were being washed away in the first place, and we're going to blame it on the SIX INCHES of global sea level rise since the mid-1930s."
They also casually toss in the fact that the Solomons are very geologically active, and a lot of the sea level rise they refer to is RELATIVE sea level rise - in other words, the water didn't rise, the land sank - often by as much as three times the amount of actual sea level rise over time.
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?
You freakin' conservative wack job. Obama has nothing to hide when he refuses to release public funded studies. And Hillary had nothing to hide when she deleted all of those emails from the server that she wasn't allowed to use. And Obama was just showing his love for this country when he released all of those dangerous terrorists back to the mid-east, and when he releases all of those felons, including murders, from federal prisons, and didn't even deport the illegals.
Put back on your tinfoil hat. Clearly there is nothing to see here.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
and how much did the sea level rise?
to say whole islands and coastlines that were permanently above(not land that go below due to tides and seasonal weather for instance) are now below sea through rise of sea level(instead of soil erosion, effect of currents, artificial land/jetty creation, volcanic activity, etc ) means sea level must have risen considerable number of centimeters.
if sea level rose uniformly (and it must), coastline should be lost on all parts of the world to similar significant extent, and this needs be observed more broadly.
-
i live on the sea shore in tropics, for very long time, i for one don't see any change whatever . but it is not scientific to generalize from my experience, nor should we generalize from isolated observations, about a phenomenon, which if true, should be observed more generally.
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
Based upon a $3.00 gallon of gasoline, the average break-down is as follows.
Gasoline Retailer $.01 cents per gallon
Oil Company $.08 cents per gallon
Refining $.29 cents per gallon
Marketing/Distribution $.32 cents per gallon
Cost of crude $1.71 per gallon (delivered)
Taxes $.59 cents per gallon - no one in the gubmint got their hands dirty supplying oil but they take the lion's share.
Who is gouging who?
"How about just pricing fossil fuels to take into account extant and future climate change"
One approach could be to tariff imported oil to keep the gasoline price in the US at, say, $3.50/gal. If a Republican is elected this year, we can include Canadian production in the 'domestic' side of the tariff area. This will cause several good things to happen at once, videlicet:
1. The Ay-rab world is screwed and will go bankrupt. Good riddance as funding for international terrorism disappears.
2. Domestic oil production is encouraged, and employment in the oil patch maintained.
3. A somewhat higher but stable gas price encourages electric vehicle proliferation.
4. The revenue can be earmarked for carbon-free energy independence infrastructure. Our Navajo would no longer have to sell most of their uranium to France.
5. If we can replace enough domestic oil usage with carbon-free energy, we might even export domestic oil. Everybody wins except for OPEC.
Not even that fortunately.
Read the article, the summary is a bald faced lie.
In fact, the total land area of the Solomons is growing relatively quickly, there are a few exceptions, which are
basically old unstable low lying reefs that were washed away in a couple of major tropical cyclones, which is
very normal. They are selectively reporting a very few examples where it is not..
Add to that a couple of islands where, due to human pollution the coral has experience die back (remember, many
of these islands are natural growing coral, when it dies, they erode away..)
Its actually quite impressive that the total land area is growing..
Of course that doesn't suit certain political agendas, and doesn't generate free money (aid..), so....
I had a feeling the ACs weren't going to like this story one bit. No sirree. You can't pull any of that climate change nonsense over their eyes. They're too smart for that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Still, the evidence was presented. The cost of denial is upon you, you pick wrong you pay. My money is going to investment into Appalachian Ocean Front properties.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You're either underestimating the future change or overestimating the past change. Generally there isn't a goal temperature/CO2 level, just a pre-industrial baseline. We've already done enough to change the planet drastically. At this point we're just hoping that we don't continue to make things worse. At this point, we're still emitting ever-greater amounts of carbon year after year. At what point do you imagine that we should maybe dial back the things that we know raise the equilibrium temperature of the Earth? How quickly do you think plants and animals can adapt to 3-5 degrees of global temperature change? Because it looks like people would rather find out the answer to these things by massive uncontrolled experiment rather than simulation at this point. Buckle up.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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>
no one in the gubmint got their hands dirty supplying oil
Are you joking? Did you not see the price tag on the second gulf war?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Based upon a $3.00 gallon of gasoline, the average break-down is as follows.
Gasoline Retailer $.01 cents per gallon Oil Company $.08 cents per gallon Refining $.29 cents per gallon Marketing/Distribution $.32 cents per gallon Cost of crude $1.71 per gallon (delivered)
Taxes $.59 cents per gallon - no one in the gubmint got their hands dirty supplying oil but they take the lion's share.
Who is gouging who?
I work in the oil industry providing logistics software as a service. Let me reformat your list, again based on $3.00 per gallon of gasoline (your numbers are off but they're mostly besides the point):
$0.01 per gallon Gasoline retailer
$0.08 per gallon Oil company
$0.29 per gallon Oil company (refining)
$0.32 per gallon Oil company (marketing and distribution)
$1.71 per gallon Oil company (crude extraction and delivery)
$0.59 per gallon taxes
Totals:
$2.40 per gallon Oil company
$0.59 per gallon Taxes (seems like a good price for the roads and infrastructure and environmental cleanups involved, no?)
$0.01 per gallon Gasoline retailer
And at every step of the way, the oil companies push off every last inch of risk and liability they can, but hook and by crook, on whomever they can force it.
You, sir, are ignorant and a fool. And spewing your ignorance and foolishness all over the 'net is a detriment to us all.
British Columbia has one now that's been quite successful: "We've grown our economy at the same time we've had what the World Bank calls the most successful carbon taxes in the world." - http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
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.
Gasoline Retailer $.01 cents per gallon
Within 5 miles of my house, gas prices vary by 40 cents per gallon (Chevron is the highest, Rotten Robbie is the lowest). So there is no way that the retail margin is only 1 cent.
So you have some actual evidence that these islands sinking is due to subduction, right? As well as evidence that there is no sea level rise, right?
There is plenty of evidence that sea levels are rising ... by about 2.5mm per year, or about an inch per decade. There is no way that is enough to "sink an island". This article is the kind of stupid over-the-top alarmism that drives more people into the denialist camp.
Climate change is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but it is not an imminent crisis. We don't need lies and hyperbolic exaggerations to scare people into taking action. That is counter-productive, and just leads to crisis-fatigue and loss of credibility. Nothing did more damage to the credibility of climate scientists than the wild exaggerations in the 2007 IPCC report, and this is just more of the same garbage.
So you have some actual evidence that these islands sinking is due to subduction, right?
I don't think he needs it. According to the most alarming numbers, sea levels have risen some 10 cm in the past century. If we have already lost three islands to increased sea level, those islands would have to be on average 10 cm tall or so. Even assuming that the rise in sea level has strong local variations, we're talking about some really flat islands here.
In most places I've been to around the Pacific, the tide variation is more than 10 cm. So, how do we know that these islands are primarily sinking due to subduction? Easy. Here's how we know that they are gone because of rising sea levels. if the islands, 100 years ago, were under water every time the tide was high, and now are under water permanently, it is possible (but not demonstrated) that the islands are gone due to rising sea levels. If the islands were permanently dry, and they were significantly taller than 10 cm 100 years ago, then we know that their "disappearance" is due to subduction since it couldn't be cause by rising sea levels.
The goal of war is not to improve the supply of oil, it's to profit. Halliburton and many others made their money from contracts they'd never have gotten without the war.
This space intentionally left blank
So you have some actual evidence that these islands sinking is due to subduction, right? As well as evidence that there is no sea level rise, right?
With a sea rise of (best case) 2.5mm/year, I really have to ask - how short do you think these islands were?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
There's another, easier answer:
Erosion due to weather, wave, and tidal activity. This can be quite fast compared to the glacial rise of the sea level or tectonic plate movement.
From the paper in question:
Reef islands? These are formed by coral that do not grow above the surface of the water. It's the sand and other junk that pile up on these reef islands that has washed/eroded away.
From Wikipedia (Solomon Islands):
I suppose mentioning that would be counterproductive to the scare-mongering.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
My aunt went on a diet but, like so many, she didn't lose much weight and regained what little she did - based on your logic, I can therefore conclude that losing weight was never the intention of going on a diet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Hog Island, New York - I'll be amazed if any of the Man Made climate change folks knew about it before frantically googling it.
The climate is changing. Eventually we'll lose Lake Michigan because the topology of the area will continue to revert to pre ice age conditions. I won't be alive when Illinois is tropical again. Growing up in Lockport , Illinois and seeing the shale with fossils embedded sorta made me look farther than less than 50 years of data.
But I'm silly that way :)
You should share this groundbreaking insight with the worlds scientists, they have overlooked this completely, good thing you didn't.
Just because your country decided to tax fuel more than ours does doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to complain about our own.
As for your suggestion that we walk more, there are no homes within walking distance of my office (and fwiw, I walked an hours just for the exercise yesterday). The U.S. is vastly more spread out than the U.K., so please stop trying to make a comparison...it's apples vs. oranges. We're not going to rebuild our entire infrastructure, and in many places you can't find affordable housing near work. In the DC area, many people commute for more than an hour because ... traffic sucks here, and the cost of housing is much cheaper 20+ miles out, so sure tax the people who can't afford to live closer more.
Just another day in Paradise
When the lead-in inflammatory comment is the sarcasm flag...
I'm not sure why you accuse this of being thoughtless.
This is the classical "efficient market" approach to a problem of consequences: the people who cause the consequences should pay the cost of those consequences. Classical economics argues that markets are inefficient when a person (or corporation) can gain benefits from an action, but somebody else pays the cost.
So, if carbon dioxide emission has a cost, in terms of effects of global warming, the efficient market solution would be that the people emitting carbon dioxide should pay that cost, and hence allowing them to adjust their usage in such a way as to incorporate the consequences.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Ok, they know, the islands slowly went under — that is quite observable.
How do they know, it happened "due to man-made climate change"? Tasmania, for example, became an island about 10 years ago — was that due to humanity's activities too? Some shamans of the times, probably, said so... Kodiak islands used to be connected to Alaska (either by land or by ice-fields) recently enough for Kodiak bears to be genetically close to other grizzlies, but long enough ago for them to qualify for being subspecies today. Do we blame humanity inventing fire for that?
There are vast ancient cities underwater. Some of them submerged rapidly due to earthquakes, for others the explanation is not so obvious — but tectonic changes (slow or rapid) are most likely to blame.
What makes us so sure about these 5 islands?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wave action is what erodes and ultimately destroys islands, and any increase in the water level is going to have an effect on wave action.
That being said, from looking at the pictures in the PDF report it kind of looks like this can be explained by extreme weather events, like a cyclone. One of the islands has completely moved since the 1940s. As in, its current boundaries and its boundaries in the 1940s do not overlap at all. That sounds like "regular" erosion of island land brought on by extreme weather events. Whether those events are related to global warming would be another issue.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Government intrusion via a "market-like" mechanism is not the free market.
Absolutely. And a totally "free" market includes transactions of the following sort: "I point a gun at you and give you the choice, either I take your money, or I shoot you and then take your money." That's a free market transaction with no government interference. But this transaction is beneficial to the robber only because the consequences to you are not included in the robber's profit calculation.
The government's role is as a mechanism to say "if your actions create a consequence to other people (such as, say killing them), your actions need to be regulated."
We have already established that this is what the government does. We're just arguing in which circumstances government intervention is needed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
This garbage got +4? Really? Most oil companies don't do all of the above steps - most refineries aren't the same company as the people who pump it out of the ground. And all of those steps cost quite a bit. Furthermore, it seems like with $0.59 per gallon, American roads and bridges should be in a much better state than they are.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
http://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/...
Meanwhile Miami Beach is already underwater
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.