Do you remember the warnings that the tropical island paradises in the Pacific and Indian Oceans would soon be submerged due to rising sea levels? This is all nonsense, as current data shows. Rather, it seems, sea levels used to be well above current levels.
For the climate sect, the equation “temperature rise = melting glaciers and polar ice caps = sea level rise = sinking island paradises” is irrefutable. A quasi-religious dogma, if you want to look at it that way. But the facts once again contradict the alarmist predictions of the climate doomsday prophets. Because all the tropical islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans don’t sink into the sea. On the contrary, they are apparently even increasing in land mass.
Don’t you believe it? Then take a look at a new study published in Nature by Kench et al., which drew on comprehensive data sets. The authors analyzed the dynamics of a Maldivian reef island on a thousand to ten thousand year time scale.
The researchers found that the island’s changes over the past half-century (±40 m of movement) are not unprecedented compared to paleodynamic evidence. So absolutely nothing unusual is happening. The global data suggests that almost all of the islands are actually growing and not disappearing under water as climate alarmists wrongly believe. “Recent shoreline changes (±40 m/50 years) are dwarfed by shoreline changes (±200 m/100 years) that have occurred over the past several centuries,” the study authors write.
This also fits with a study published four years ago. In it the authors write:
“Over the past few decades, there has been no sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea level rise in the atoll islands. 88.6 percent of the islands were either stable or increasing in area, while only 11.4 percent were shrinking. It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size. These results show that the area stability of atolls and islands is a global trend, independent of the rate of sea level rise.”
It shows that a sincere scientific discussion of this topic is essential. When such important facts are withheld from the public because they don’t fit into the “We’re all going to die!” doomsday scheme, political steps continue to be taken with disastrous economic and social consequences. As Professor Kench’s study authors noted, many of the coral reef islands have only formed in the last 1,400 years (some of them have only existed for around 300-400 years) and most of them appear to be growing rather than shrinking. However, this also raises the question of whether the water level was so much higher then than it is today, because corals only grow under water.