Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting 271
Hugh Pickens writes "The president of the Maldives and 11 ministers, decked out in scuba gear, held a cabinet meeting 4m underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation. While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century. President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet spent half an hour on the sea bed, communicating with white boards and hand signals and signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. The Maldives has already begun to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees. Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore. 'We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked,' he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers. 'If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world.'"
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:2, Informative)
> I have two graphs here.
> In the first graph you can see the global warming measured per year.
> In the second paragraph you can see the carbondioxide emissions meassured per year.
> Now let's fold these two together, shall we?" And they totally did not match.
> Man that guy made my fucking day!
I'm sure he did. He's probably a member of a liar-club called "Groene rekenkamer" or associated with it. Or something. Those are all people who have no clue what reasoning is (even if some have a university degree) and no idea about the facts or to interpret them.
I examined many of their claims/reasonings and found them all to be lies and extremely poor reasonings respectively.
And btw. for your information, of course those graphs don't need to match. There are obvious delays as energy can be used e.g. in extra tree growth (which will come to haunt us later when those trees decay and the limit of extra tree growth caused by higher CO2 levels is reached), and in e.g. acidification of the ocean, absorbtion of energy where it's not directly visible at this moment etc.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Its the same with coral atolls everywhere.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:1, Informative)
and here is your evidence it was in the works before industrialism really kicked in http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/cold-hard-facts-take-the-heat-out-of-some-hot-claims/2007/08/17/1186857765035.html [smh.com.au]
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, good for them. (Score:3, Informative)
That's right. But a lot of the Netherlands is below sea level whereas the Maldives are above sea-level. So who has most to fear?
The Maledives, because their ratio of land area to coast line (yes, I know, a natural coast line is infinitely long, but we are talking dikes here, which have a minimum size) is much worse than that of the Netherlands.
And you forget that all dutch land that is below sealevel is artificial anyway and won by closing off vast areas from the Northern Sea with large embankments, which in turn are built to be as short as possible for a maximum of land gain.
Whoever suggests that this is a feasible way for the Maledives where the average distance between two atolls is much longer than even the large Afsluitdijk (20 mls), got something wrong.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:4, Informative)
Your source sucks. [scienceblogs.com]
Here's a better one. [climateprogress.org]
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:2, Informative)
CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 (carbonic acid).
As the CO2 is absorbed into the sea, the acid content goes up = dead coral!
No sympathy here... (Score:3, Informative)
I have no sympathy for a country that forces its people to convert to islam and subjects almost 1/3 of the population to a form of serfdom. In addition if you are not a muslim and a native then you are either executed, imprisoned or expelled. Finally the country is extremely racist when it comes to non-muslims. I've had the unfortunate pleasure of being sent to the main island a few times for work. While the country is very pretty the people are not with the exception of the lowly peasants.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
The catastrophe is not for nature, it's for man.
P.S. Corals worldwide are dying. The two culprits fingered so far are rising oceanic acidity (caused by excessive atmospheric CO2 being gas-exchang'd right into the ocean) and human herpes simplex viruses, which apparently kill off some of the important organisms responsible for helping to build and maintain coral.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)
Sea level has NOT been rising (Score:4, Informative)
The following interview Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedisch expert on sea-level geophysics, explains how the data has been misrepresented to feed the global warming scare http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf [climatechangefacts.info]. The reality is that little has happened to the sea level over the past decades.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:4, Informative)
also temperature shocks (like 1998 el nino) make the coral symbiosis into a parasitic situation and now-harmful zoanthids are expelled from the structure leading to "bleached coral sydrome". This dead coral has nothing to repair the small cracks & so breaks up after the next year or two of storms.
Basically the coral can't adapt fast enough and it may be 1000 years before it's back on track. By which time it has sunk far enough below the exponential decay of underwater sunlight not to regenerate back up to the surface with any great pace. Wave energy probably doesn't get below 100m depth, while the smallest amount of sunlight may make it down that far, so there is some hope for eventual regeneration.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:2, Informative)
Quite so. But if you listen/look carefully, you can still find some truth from scientists willing to speak out. See for example this interview on the sea-level fraud: http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf [climatechangefacts.info]. Turns out that sea levels have not been rising.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Corals grow within very narrow limits of temperature, irradiance, salinity, pH and turbidity; all variables which are influenced by climate and weather. More CO2 means more acidic ocean water, which would retard coral growth. Warmer oceans would also reduce carbonate ion saturation, having the same effect.
Photo Gallery (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline.
The car is not going slower, it's going 200 mph! Or in other words, you're an ass. Is this the kind of thing you bring up in ordinary conversation? You must be a hit at parties. I'd hit you twice.
You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference;
This is extremely disingenuous. It's the same retarded argument as "even though we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we put out ten times more CO2 than volcanism every year, and we know volcanism to be a major driver of global CO2, we don't believe that there is a greenhouse effect, and by the way global temperatures have only risen a little over one degree, that's a tiny shift!" But it's a fucking stupid statement because 99% of everything interesting on the planet occurs in a narrow temperature range, and by the same token, the ocean functions in a very small Ph range.
in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease,
You are either ignorant or outright lying, since we know that small shifts in Ph have severe ramifications for much ocean life, including all marine mammals, and especially including coral reefs (where most of the ocean's diversity is) and algae (where most of the world's oxygen comes from.) Why don't you stop spreading the lies of the deniers? We're not even in Egypt... although, come to mention it, have you seen the Nile?
Re:Sea level has NOT been rising (Score:1, Informative)
Morner can claim that all he wants, but he's not entitled to his own reality. NASA has satellites that measure this, such as TOPEX/JASON:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6638
There are others that extend this back further.
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:5, Informative)
There is no link that says that we put out 10 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, because that statement is wrong, but not in the way that you think. The difference is much, much higher.
A 1991 study[1] put the annual volcanic contribution of atmospheric CO2 at 4E12 mol/year, or 176 million tons. Annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are around 27 billion metric tons; the US power industry alone produces more than 2.4 billion tons.[2] The factor between worldwide volcanic and human emissions of CO2 is actually around 150.
[1] Gerlach, T.M., 1991, Present-day CO2 emissions from volcanoes: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (EOS))
[2] http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html [doe.gov]
Aren't they busy killing all non-muslims ? (Score:2, Informative)
This is the revised penal code for the maldives [minivannews.com]. Surely a cabinet that makes such decisions are worthy of billions of aid !
They claim, by the way, that it is the duty of all muslims, "even in America", to do this.
I'm tempted, quite frankly, to not give a shit. Quite frankly, I hope their islands do not just disappear, but everyone of these racist assholes drowns in those rising waters. Slowly.
Re:Showboating (Score:2, Informative)
All in all, the sea level rise is the same pace for over 150 years. Nonsense. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html [csiro.au] (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.) Quote: "We have used a combination of historical tide-gauge data and satellite-altimeter data to estimate global averaged sea level change from 1870 to 2004. During this period, global-averaged sea level rose almost 20 cm, with an average rate of rise of about 1.7 mm/yr over the 20th Century. The sea level record indicates a statistically significant increase in the rate of rise between 1870 to 2004." (emphasis mine) CC.
I think you'll find CSIRO also found that the Maldives is affected by the fact they "mine" the protective coral reef for building materials thus exposing the islands to the sea with greatly reduced protection for the community. The odd thing is, they are still building large resorts, using coral. How fair dinkum is this fraud? I also believe you'll find that the oceans have not risen significantly over the 20th century. The rise, beginning in 1870 (the greatest rise in the earlier years) is due to the Little Ice Age ending. In addition, some parts of the Earth's surface are "sinking" and others are "rising" If the sea floor rises, of course sea water will be displaced. Additionally, there has been no change to Australia's National Datum (to my knowledge), neither have any airports been required to reset the local altimeter settings. Finally, there is no discernable rise in sea level in any major Australian port, at the many airfields that are on the shore, have a runway extending into the sea or are situated in areas of swamp. I always thought that water always sought its own level, so tidal effects aside, if the sea is rising in the Maldives it should be rising everywhere.
Re:Showboating (Score:2, Informative)
Re:CO2 cutbacks cannot stop climate change (Score:3, Informative)
With respect to credible evidence, here's the problem: there is no credible evidence on the side of those linking man, co2 and temperature.
This is provably false. We have evidence linking CO2 and man, and we have evidence linking CO2 and temperature. We know about how fast suboceanic limestone can remove CO2 from the water (the primary fixer of oceanic CO2) and we know that limit has been exceeded. We can even make a pretty good estimate of how much CO2 is produced by human activities. We also know beyond the shadow of a doubt that human activity has had a negative effect on CO2 fixing; for instance, there's more wooded acres in the USA, but practically no old growth, which is a more effective carbon sink. Meanwhile, woodlands worldwide have diminished as well. Oceanic algae is in deep trouble due in part to ocean acidification, and in large part due to higher concentrations of UV resulting from ozone depletion. The higher UV exposure drives the algae below the surface, where its rate of respiration is greatly reduced.
(hence the need to get rid of the medieval warm period in order to make the temperature look unprecedented
You are attempting to manufacture a need which does not exist.
Given that 20th century temperature change is well within the bounds of natural variation,
Yes, it is, but since we lack any natural explanation it is more likely that the results are due to human activity. You don't see surges in CO2 like this without major volcanic activity or some other similar explanation. We knew a lot less about global weather during the medieval warm period, and humanity wasn't keeping very close track of the globe compared to what things look like now, where we have near-global monitoring of infrared (for example) through the slow walker program, or its descendants.
I'm smart enough to understand the papers and I do read them. I'm smart enough to understand the principles. I'm smart enough to understand the criticisms and I'm smart enough to know that Scientists are Human and Humans are fallible.
It's not so much an appeal to authority as questioning yours. We have a reason to believe that those people know something. We have no reason to believe that you are doing anything other than trolling, although I'm inclined to be charitable and believe that you actually believe this stuff.
My criticisms come from Atmospheric Physicists', who know how accurate the models actually are.
Look, we know from a physics standpoint what happens when solar radiation passes through an atmosphere with more or less CO2 in it. If you want to rewrite physics, that's cool. I'm interested in the results. Until then, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we put out a lot more of it than volcanism which we know to be a major driver of CO2 production, and CO2 levels continue to rise. Therefore, until you kick physics in the ding-ding, humans are [at least partly] responsible for global warming due to the greenhouse effect. At minimum, we are intensifying a natural effect. If you would like to argue otherwise, please address these points, which nobody seems to want to tackle any time I bring them up.