As Seas Rise, Maldives Seek To Buy a New Homeland 521
Peace Corps Online writes "The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as insurance against climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees as the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59 cm by the year 2100. Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water so even a 'small rise' in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago. 'We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,' says the Muslim country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, adding that he has already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be 'receptive.' India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates; Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. 'We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.'"
A myth. (Score:2, Insightful)
They have nothing to worry about, Global Warming is just a myth!
...Right?
If the summary is correct, and they are only 150 centimeters above water... than this isn't a very good place to build regardless of global warming or not. Your average over-sized wave could swamp the entire island.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Ps - I'm not trolling by saying the Gvt is encouraging it, that's just how I would phrase the lawsuit.
The lowest point in the Netherlands (Score:4, Insightful)
Is 7 meters(ca. 21 feet) below sealevel and we are not leaving. Running is a bad solution. Fight the water because it will fight you. Feet getting wet? Build dams and dykes and stay safe. That idea is probably 10 times cheaper and more efficient than the whole "move everyboy out and buy a new homeland plan".
Re:Australia's unoccupied land (Score:4, Insightful)
Just for the convenience of keeping borders "manageable", I doubt any place they occupy can be elsewhere but on a seashore. Who'd want to lock themselves in a country, only to have them embargo you over a trade dispute? I mean, being land-locked is bad enough, but being bad locked inside a country that's bigger than you, whose standing army outnumbers you and who doesn't like you anymore?
On the other hand, maybe New Zealand will offer a better deal.
Re:A simple question (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers
JE
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Muslims and Jews take matters into their own hands and fix their own problems.
Which explains why Israel has been at peace with her neighbors since her inception and the Middle East is one of the nicest places on Earth to call home......
Re:A myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
A true environmentalist SHOULD be skeptical about a body of law explicitly allowing developing nations to pollute. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do, because there is not in fact any real benefit to it. The simple truth is that it is more cost-effective to be "green" over any kind of reasonable time scale.
Re:Generic Rhetoric Comment (Score:5, Insightful)
(I'm uninformed on Bangladesh so I cannot comment on them specific.)
Other places either wait for help (which will never arrive from the uninformed or the uncaring) or will be forced to just make a run for it at the last moment. Displaced refugees NEVER works. This proves out time and time again. Even the poorest of nations could start asking to allow very small groups to be allowed in now in an effort to begin a relocation program. Nasheed, when queried on keeping his people together, says that in 50 years he does not expect them to maintain much if any of their culture. He knows the idea of just displacing one group into another never works and is planning on blending his people in small increments.
As for agreeing it's manmade, I'm still on the fence on that. Man-helped, no doubt. And should we carbon-whores pay into a sollution, yes we should. The people of nations like this are on the very low end of responsible. (But even the Maldives have concrete roads and cars!) But we've only walked erect a few million years. The face of this planet in that space of time has changed. In a billion years this planet's face has changed dramatically. So change is a constant. We just don't adapt as well as other species. We like finding blame and do not seem to flow well this type of change.
Re:How interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
I really don't get why people are so reluctant to consider that burning 80 million barrels of oil each day does not affect the climate. I keep hearing those "Oh, I don't believe it" voices on /., but really, is it anything else than an excuse for not changing a wasteful lifestyle? A bit like an addict would deny having a problem?
Re:A myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
A true environmentalist SHOULD be skeptical about a body of law explicitly allowing developing nations to pollute. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do, because there is not in fact any real benefit to it. The simple truth is that it is more cost-effective to be "green" over any kind of reasonable time scale.
It also seems counterproductive from an economic standpoint. If we make carbon emissions expensive in the United States and Europe what's to stop companies from moving carbon-intensive parts of their operations to China and India? Then we lose twice -- we haven't brought emissions down any (in fact we probably brought them up due to the logistics of moving goods greater distances) and we've wiped out jobs and a tax base here at home.
I think we need a big investment into green technology but agreeing to mandated cuts in emissions while simultaneously agreeing to allow developing countries to increase emissions seems like an incredibly dumb idea to me. We are screwing ourselves environmentally and economically.
Re:Floodbanks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sea level around the Maldives is not raising! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, that video is scientific garbage.
There was not a global 30cm drop in seal level around 1970, which would be quite noticeable.
Local mean sea level varies quite a bit due to geological factors and local weather effects such as atmospheric pressure. This produces statistical variation on various scales; individual locations might well see contrary trends; even aggregate trends smoothed over three year weighted averages tend to have considerable noise.
In any case, an island like the one in the video is a poor choice as a benchmark because mean sea level varies across the Pacific by as much as 60cm at any given time due to atmospheric effects. The El Nino/Southern Oscillation could well produce dramatic shifts in local MSL on an island like this. Pressure driven changes in MSL in this region can reach 30cm or in rare cases even more.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pollution also just happens to contribute to the global climate. Ozone depletion due to man made chemicals also contributes. Why qualify the warming with a probably - the fact that the earth has been heating up is indisputable. The cause is contentious, but at the very least we are contributing to and exacerbating the problem.
Re:A myth. (Score:4, Insightful)
agreeing to allow developing countries to increase emissions seems like an incredibly dumb idea to me
Are you kidding me?! Take a look at any 'developing nation' in Africa. Many people can't even get clean water, much less food, and you expect them not to increase emissions/go green?! These countries are printing million dollar notes because of absurd inflation and you are not allowing them to increase emssions?! Developing countries have no other choice than to use the cheapest energy source, period. As a country progresses, economically and technologically, they can begin to invest into cleaner technologies and eventually start to go 'green'. Even here in American it is still more expensive to consumer green energy than it is to consume oil and coal. With your complete and utter ignorance of economic conditions of developing countries and, it seems, the basics of economics, you should be more circumspect in questioning other people's intelligence.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
We shouldn't be wasteful, and I agree that we may be effecting the climate, but stories like this just smack of "the sky is falling" all over again. Why can't we have environmentalism without the alarm? Thats the kind of environmentalist I am, I just want to attempt to stop being wasteful and live more frugally and more in-line with nature (now I know its impossible to be completly CO2 free, but we can do better then we are now.)
There are better ways to combat environmental problems then alarmism.
Moving to India? Forget it (Score:1, Insightful)
Call me a troll if you want, but 300,000 Maldiveian people moving into India will be met with fierce opposition. Not because the country is already overpopulated, but because these 300,000 folks are Muslim.
Read up the history of India to understand the immense damage Muslims have done and are still doing, and you will sympathize with us if we shut our doors on Muslim immigrants.
Whatever the secularists may say, fact is - if the Muslim population becomes the majority in a certain area, you can be sure as hell that they will demand separate nationhood. That was how Pakistan came into existence. And look what's happening in Kashmir - they drove out all Hindus and now they say their hearts are with Pakistan!
Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have changed the demography in the Nort East Indian state of Assam. They now want a separate muslim state there. They are fighting for it. By setting off bombs in the state.
Sorry and all that, but tell the Maldievean people to go somewhere else.
Re:A myth. (Score:2, Insightful)
I really don't get why people are so reluctant to consider that burning 80 million barrels of oil each day does not affect the climate. I keep hearing those "Oh, I don't believe it" voices on /.,
That argument is a good enough to deny evolution, so why not global warming?
Re:A myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living. But if we clean up our act, then China may simply follow suit.
I would like to see progress made on green technology (which will translate into more jobs and economic recovery) so that we can bring emissions down and sell that technology to the rest of the World -- but why all of this focus on Kyoto when the protocol itself is inherently unfair to developed countries?
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living.
I would disagree. Your statement is probably accurate with existing technology but I don't see why our standard of living would be unsustainable with greener/carbon neutral technology. We should certainly hope that this is the case -- because history doesn't have very many (any?) examples of rich countries willingly accepting a lower standard of living for the "greater good".
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
So if you think it's a harmful compromise why should we ratify it? Wouldn't it be better to come up with something better? Or just invest the money into green technology and let the marketplace sort it out? As it stands I'd be concerned that all we'll wind up doing is shifting carbon-intensive production overseas -- so the emissions don't go down (they probably go up because of logistical considerations) and the economic impact winds up being negative. Hardly a winning formula to solve the climate crisis.
Re:The lowest point in the Netherlands (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A simple question (Score:4, Insightful)
3.1mm/yr, and the entire country is only 115 sq. miles [wikipedia.org], with a third of the population in the capital city, which sits on less than 1 square mile [wikipedia.org]. Additionally, from a brief glance at the most populous towns/villages [wikipedia.org], it looks like another third of the population is residing on no more than 10 sq. miles.
Would it really be more cost effective to move the entire population to a new "homeland", instead of investing in efficiently condensing the population, and building a levee system around the current well-developed, and incredibly expensive-to-replace infrastructure?!!?
This smells like a "Poor us!" bid for attention and money, playing off of the "green guilt" of the rest of the developed world.
In other words...I'm calling shenanigans.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's great, and I'm sure there is an effect. But any visible measures being taken today are mostly at the individual consumer level... cutting vehicle emissions 20% will reduce total carbon release, what, 1%? It's probably not even measurable.
I'm not as much concerned about the CO2 in our atmosphere as I am about the even larger amounts of heavy metals, radioactive isotopes, and all manner of other poisons that are released into the air, ground and water all around the world by industrial activity. They are, immediately, much more harmful to all life, and literally nothing is being done about them.
But go ahead, displace your carbon intensive activities to other countries that don't care (or are not allowed to care by Kyoto), get whacked by a triple whammy of lost jobs, increased carbon release from those activities, and even more carbon release from transporting stuff back and forth.
Re:A simple question (Score:3, Insightful)
Arrogant? Why? We have the ability to wipe most human life off the planet in about an hour using nuclear weapons. Why is it arrogance to think we could do it in 50 years by other means?
Re:But Australia has no borders (Score:3, Insightful)
And you're an asshole for making sweeping generalizations based on anecdotes and, most likely, for speaking about subjects on the sole basis of hearsay from idiot reporters.
You want a flame war? We can do that. Or, you stop believing in the fallacy of a single cause. Katrina was a natural disaster, an engineering disaster (with many complicated aspects), a governmental disaster (at all levels), and a humanitarian disaster (the most visible part). And Katrina is only a small part of the problem: you are apparently ignorant of the longstanding and ongoing ecological disaster which is the whole of southeast Louisiana.
Re:Are they smoking crack? (Score:1, Insightful)
Another brain eaten by the propagandist Steven Milloy. Blah blah taxes. Blah blah free market.
They don't need an excuse to take your money. The framework for taxation is present and they can increase your taxes whenever they feel like it. The fact that your country is monstrously in the hole would be a fine reason to raise your taxes. The fact that a substantial portion of your country's population wants to conquer the Muslims in the name of 'defense' is a fine reason to raise your taxes. The fact that a large percentage of your senior population depends upon entitlement programs to live day to day is a fine reason to raise your taxes.
But naturally it's the competitive and antagonistic process of rigorous scientific research that is the true rationale for raising your taxes. Nothing to see here, just an international conspiracy to raise the taxes.
Re:Moving to India? Forget it (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at Kerala (A state in Kerala). The population is close to 30 million of which about 8 mill. are muslim and another 10 christian. And we have never had a riot or a problem. Maybe education goes a long way rather than anti-islamism ? (We try to get everyone to atleast read and write).
Anyway, as a hindu from Kerala, I would happily welcome these 300K people if they are displaced. It would'nt change things even a bit for us.
On the other hand Kerala itself is no more than 6 meters above sea level, but I guess we could always move to the Western Ghat mountain ranges if it comes to that.
Re:A myth. (Score:1, Insightful)
at a rate faster than our models
The key word here is "models".
Re:A simple question (Score:3, Insightful)
To some extent, it's pretty irrelevant whether humans are changing it or not. The true question is "What is the cost of the changing climate, and what is the cost of fixing it?" This of course begs the question of whether the change is manmade or not, but it's not the starting point.
No, the effect humans are having is ALL that matters when trying to figure out the cost of 'fixing' climate change. The cost of preventing climate change is 100% dependent on how much our activity can impact it. If our influence on climate change is enormous maybe we could change it enough by spending $10 per year, but if we have only a small influence on climate change, even trillions of dollars may not be enough to change climate to a meaningful extent.
We have a cost/benefit equation before us to choose between adapting to climate change, and trying to stop it, or some combination there of. The impact that we can have on climate change is of unquestionable importance to that decision and the alarmists seem to think that by setting the costs for adaptation at infinity they can ignore the question, they can't.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
computational physics work with assumptions that would make a climatologist blush, and models are always non-physical.
Two words, data quality. Computational physics models are calibrated against reliable test data by building REAL examples of what is being modeled. That's the only real way to know if the assumptions used are going to allow reliable results. Our data for most variables in GCM's don't even amount to 100 years worth before relying on projections and estimates. Better still, virtually all the measured data we have is considered to be historically unprecedented(that's bad for calibrating against).
If you want to go further, the complexity of the climate system makes the complexity of a small plasma look childish by comparison.
Re:A myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in my experience, 90% of all people are idiots. And that's true for all races, sexes, religions and whatnot. 90% fucking idiots. That's rather depressing...