Sinking Pacific island Kiribati considers moving to a man-made alternative

[panzerfaust]

Source: The Independent (UK)

The future for Kiribati, one of the low-lying Pacific nations threatened by rising seas, is so dire that the government is contemplating relocating the entire population to man-made islands resembling giant oil rigs.

"We're considering everything... because we are running out of options," the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, said yesterday in Auckland, where he is attending the Pacific Islands Forum. He said that his small, impoverished country – where the highest land is no more than two metres above sea level – urgently needed the world to take action on climate change.
Vulnerable Pacific nations have acquired a powerful new ally, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Kiribati on his way to the Auckland conference. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr Ban warned: "For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to Kiribati. Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere." Beachside villages in Kiribati – which consists of 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – have already had to move to escape the encroaching waves. Water supplies have been contaminated by salt water, and crops destroyed. Erosion, caused partly by storms and flooding, is increasingly serious...



Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/sinking-pacific-island-kiribati-considers-moving-to-a-manmade-alternative-2350964.html

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Coming Soon to a Continent Near You.

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[ananda]

2. Wow.

I didn't realize that Florida and Louisiana would go completely under.

[No Elephants]

15. And yet they both have Republican Governors and Senators. Propaganda may be more powerful than the

survival instinct.

Then again, many of us prefer denial to reality. Whether it's your spouse cheating or global warming, I guess all of prefer to be in denial about something.

We just pick different issues.

[Blue_Tires]

17. try getting the anti-science types to understand...

its impossible when they can't even get past evolution

[Bosonic]

3. That map is +60 metres above current sea level

Is that a prediction of any global warming models?

http://flood.firetree.net/

[trud]

4. problem with your map

That's an interesting map you have there, Bosonic, but I believe there's something odd about it. A 3 meter rise, which some models predict in this century, will flood my house in an area of Rhode Island. Actually a one meter rise will flood it. So I used your map to look at RI, and there's a big jagged edge piece where the water incursion is not showing. So who knows what the map is portraying.

[Bosonic]

5. It's based on digital elevation data

and then works out any flooding from that.

I can't speak to it's accuracy on a per house basis, but I believe it's broadly accurate (see http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/), and to fully flood the entire state of Florida (and points inward) would take a very significant sea level rise.

[trud]

7. It's not broadly accurate

for RI and Mass. there is a big chunk with jaggy edges missing that implies no flooding in large areas that are sure to flood, like Providence

[Bosonic]

9. It does say it only covers upto 60 degrees latitude

and is less accurate approaching that limit (also in areas with lots of tall buildings).

However over Florida I do believe it is reasonably accurate, and surely you concur that the flooding depicted in the OP map is not within any reputable flooding model for anytime in the 21st (or even 22nd) century.

Alarmist maps discredit global warming research, and make it easier for people to pooh-pooh any factual predictions. The OP map may as well have sharks with laser-beam eyes attacking people on it as well...

[trud]

10. no, I do not

concur that the OP map is inaccurate. The numbers I have read for RI indicate substantial flooding by the end of the century. For other areas I cannot say.

The RI/ Mass problems with your linked map have nothing to do with 60 degrees latitude. Also,Narragansett Bay is not full of tall buildings.

[Bosonic]

12. If you really believe the scale of flooding in that map is a serious possibility in your lifetime

(or this century) and you're not simply being a contrarian, then I fail to understand why you're wasting your time on a message board. You should be protesting/organizing to within an inch of your life in a desperate attempt to stop it (and moving from your flood-prone abode); that map is some serious shit.

[trud]

13. I do what I can

in my life. You don't really believe Washington is going to listen to individuals, do you? I'm an old woman, so my life expectancy is hopefully less than when the family house floods.

[Uncle Joe]

8. Here is an estimate of 80 meters if all land based glaciers melt, ie; Antarctic, Greenland.

On a thread by autorank.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1936383#1936414

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Most of the current global land ice mass is located in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (table 1). Complete melting of these ice sheets could lead to a sea-level rise of about 80 meters, whereas melting of all other glaciers could lead to a sea-level rise of only one-half meter.

It's just a matter of to what extent the Earth's land based glaciers melt.

[byronius]

6. This exact occurence is detailed by Kim Stanley Robinson in 'Fourty Signs Of Rain'.

What comes next in the book is frickin' horrible.

[Duer 157099]

11. OT, but a tremendously funny book about Kiribati

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Lives-Cannibals-Equatorial-Pacific/dp/0767915305/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315513775&sr=8-1

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

At 26, Troost followed his wife to Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. Virtually ignored by the rest of humanity (its erstwhile colonial owners, the Brits, left in 1979), Kiribati is the kind of place where dolphins frolic in lagoons, days end with glorious sunsets and airplanes might have to circle overhead because pigs occupy the island's sole runway. Troost's wife was working for an international nonprofit; the author himself planned to hang out and maybe write a literary masterpiece. But Kiribati wasn't quite paradise. It was polluted, overpopulated and scorchingly sunny (Troost could almost feel his freckles mutating into something "interesting and tumorous"). The villages overflowed with scavengers and recently introduced, nonbiodegradable trash. And the Kiribati people seemed excessively hedonistic. Yet after two years, Troost and his wife felt so comfortable, they were reluctant to return home. Troost is a sharp, funny writer, richly evoking the strange, day-by-day wonder that became his life in the islands. One night, he's doing his best funky chicken with dancing Kiribati; the next morning, he's on the high seas contemplating a toilet extending off the boat's stern (when the ocean was rough, he learns, it was like using a bidet). Troost's chronicle of his sojourn in a forgotten world is a comic masterwork of travel writing and a revealing look at a culture clash.

[Devil_Fish]

14. No Problem:

[DavidDvorkin]

16. Clumsy headline from the Independent

The island isn't sinking. As the article explains, the sea is rising.

The comments in the paper are disturbing.

[KamaAina]

18. Also, it's a chain of islands

actually two chains, formerly known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The two are far enough apart that the International Date Line has to deviate around them so as to keep the whole country on the same day!