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.

Comments

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[MightyMartian]

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?

Lies

[legRoom]

...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.

Re:Lies

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Read the paper. It is short, linked, and not technical.

They aren't claiming that the island got submerged due to sea level changes. They are claiming that it got eroded.

As sea levels go up, erosion (in the form of waves) gets worse. They claim that the increased erosion has completed wiped out the islands. This is a separate effect from your silly claim of a lie. You can read the paper for how they try and separate the erosion from other effects like El Nino and tides.

Re:Lies

[legRoom]

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.

Re:Lies

[legRoom]

They are claiming that it got eroded, and that it wouldn't have if the sea level were a tiny bit lower. There is no way they can know that, especially since the actual sea level rise-to-date which is possibly attributable to AGW is more like 2 cm, not 25 cm.

This is a separate effect from your silly claim of a lie.

The statement in the summary, at least, is a lie because they are asserting a definitive cause-and-effect relationship where there is - at best - an unprovable possibility of one, rather than actual solid evidence for one. The claim is being sensationalized.

Re:Lies

[legRoom]

Sorry, I forgot the post I linked doesn't include the link to the EPA graph which is my actual source: https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/oceans/sea-level.html

Re:Lies

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

CNN had an article a few years back hyperventilating about GW and a small island nation sinking and slowly evacuating over the years. In the fine print they admitted it was the land sinking, not oceans rising, but seas rising our future!

In another after the terrible tsunami, they hyperventilate again with the headline "sea rise from GW will be like the tsunami zomgggg!" In the fine print they meant 30 feet not over seconds but 300 years.

Also New Orleans is sinking because the river delta is bottled up instead of meandering back and forth over centuries and no longer deposits fresh silt everywhere to boost the slowly compressing silt. This was figured out long ago.

Re:Lies

[quantaman]

They are claiming that it got eroded, and that it wouldn't have if the sea level were a tiny bit lower. There is no way they can know that, especially since the actual sea level rise-to-date which is possibly attributable to AGW is more like 2 cm, not 25 cm.

This is a separate effect from your silly claim of a lie.

The statement in the summary, at least, is a lie because they are asserting a definitive cause-and-effect relationship where there is - at best - an unprovable possibility of one, rather than actual solid evidence for one. The claim is being sensationalized.

The summary definitely overstates things. But the paper itself is guilty of none of the things you imply.

There's actually a link to the entire paper with the abstract, I'll even helpfully bold the important bits:

Low-lying reef islands in the Solomon Islands provide a valuable window into the future impacts of global sea-level rise. Sea-level rise has been predicted to cause widespread erosion and inundation of low-lying atolls in the central Pacific. However, the limited research on reef islands in the western Pacific indicates the majority of shoreline changes and inundation to date result from extreme events, seawalls and inappropriate development rather than sea-level rise alone. Here, we present the first analysis of coastal dynamics from a sea-level rise hotspot in the Solomon Islands. 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.

I don't see these definitive claims you speak of, instead I see "sea level rise predicts X, here we observe and analyze some X that's consistent with sea level rise". I'd be more careful before making sensational claims of sensationalization.

Re:Lies

[legRoom]

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.

Re:Lies

[AmiMoJo]

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.

This is how science works. You don't start from scratch every time, proving basic physics and maths until you build up to your main point. You base your work on the work of others, building on it to advance the field. You avoid making definite statements when you can't be entirely sure, but suggest promising areas of further work.

I agree that the media has puffed this up into more than the paper warrants, but the paper itself is perfectly fine. You use a lot of weasel words and make baseless accusations, like saying they chose to focus on the islands that shrank as if it's part of some sinister plot to prove AGW is bad, when actually it was just the focus of the study. Not every study has to be a holistic review of all possible related issues, you know.

Except it's not actual sea level rise...

[cirby]

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.

Re:Then why is the WH stonewalling AGW doc release

[frovingslosh]

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.

It s alie, they are actually growing.

[thesupraman]

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....

Re:It s alie, they are actually growing.

[legRoom]

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.

You are free to disbelieve.

[EzInKy]

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.

Mitigation

[Tenebrousedge]

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.

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[jblues]

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.

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[dcooper_db9]

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?

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:subduction, try it, its free!

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:subduction, try it, its free!

[terjeber]

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.

Re:subduction, try it, its free!

[goose-incarnated]

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?

Re:subduction, try it, its free!

[rworne]

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:

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

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):

while many of the smaller islands are simply tiny atolls covered in sand and palm trees.

I suppose mentioning that would be counterproductive to the scare-mongering.

Efficient markets are not idiotic

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:SAVE THE BAGS

[ComputerGeek01]

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.

Free market transactions

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

The 144 character critique

[dcooper_db9]

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.