The Pacific Islands forum has been held recently. Australia made a splash over keeping up the coal burning, and don’t you worry about those rising sea levels. I mean its not our problem…
From the Sydney Morning Herald
Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, whose tiny atoll nation face a growing threat from rising seas levels, said members of the forum had called on Australia not to open new coal mines, move away from coal-fired power and to “do things that are necessary to keep up with the targets of the Paris agreement”.
[But], the Morrison government has worked furiously behind the scenes to convince counterparts to tone down the language of the draft Funafuti Declaration, arguing any reference to a transition away from coal-fired power was a “red line” issue for Australia.
Lots of protest and then the deputy Prime Minister said:
“I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive,” he said.
“They will continue to survive, there’s no question they’ll continue to survive and they’ll continue to survive on large aid assistance from Australia.
“They’ll continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit, pick our fruit grown with hard Australian enterprise and endeavour and we welcome them and we always will.
There you are: the capitalist paradise, “come and provide wage labour for us and everything will be ok”.
Jacinda Ardern the New Zealand Prime Minister supported the Pacific Island position and well known Australian radio gnasher, Alan Jones, with the usual calm of the Righteous stated:
“I just wonder whether [Prime Minister] Scott Morrison is going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat. I mean she is a joke this woman…”
As usual, he tried to avoid Australian responsibility, by saying China produces lots of coal (true, but when I was young I was taught that because someone else did something bad, it didn’t mean I should do it as well), and he implied that seeing this statement as part of a repeated pattern of him encouraging violence against powerful women was “wilful misinterpretation of what I said to obviously distract from the point that she was wrong about climate change and wrong about Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide level.” He also made a number of misleading charges about NZ, apparently being unaware that:
New Zealand’s primary renewable energy sources are hydro and geothermal power. About 80 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from renewable energy, compared with about 20 per cent of Australia’s.
Now Pacific Islanders know righteous Australians hate New Zealand more than them.
Sea level rise is an issue for both Australia and the Pacific.
So far sea level rises have been largely trivial (maybe 7-9 centimetres over the last 25 years. Not really perceptible by human vision, especially given tidal variation, human perceptual adaptation and lousy memory. However, even this amount of sea level rise can make a huge difference in terms of flooding and storm surges in low lying lands (such as the Pacific Islands or Bangladesh), and certainly affects underground water supplies in those regions – and even in places like the US. You can see the information on the NASA websites…. Much of this increase may have occurred through the expansion of water through heat absorption.
However the problem is that once the land ice in the Arctic and Antarctic circles starts melting, which it is with the extraordinarily high temperatures they have been getting up in Greenland and Alaska, then we are in unknown territory. The melting is, as I understand it, way more pronounced than expected at this stage of the process, as were the high arctic temperatures. The more the ice melts, the more will melt, as the local temperature’s rise, due to lack of ice. There is also heady suspicion that there is a lot of methane under the ice. Releasing this will increase the rate of warming, so even more ice will melt. Glaciers all over the world seem to be shrinking, so this is not a purely arctic or antarctic event. Glacier shrinkage will cause massive water supply problems in many countries, and hence more refugee movements, and probably wars.
In 2007 the IPCC projected a high end estimate of 60 cm by 2099 (that will probably result in Bangladesh loosing a tenth or more of its land), but in 2014 they estimated 90 cm in the same period because of more rapidly increasing temperatures. Some people suggest that the last time the average temp was around 2 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times then the water was about 5m higher than now. That would do serious damage to most coastal cities. Most of the Pacific Islands would not be remotely habitable. Some people have suggested that, with runaway climate change we are looking at tens of metres of rise before the end of this century – we have to hope those figures are not correct – and most people will assume that.
If people keep pouring greenhouse gasses and pollution into the skies then the rates of sea level increase will be faster than if they stop. Certainly, it is extremely unlikely that water levels will go down. If Tuvalu is increasing in size, it is almost certainly not because water is going down. Land masses apparently increase for many reasons, but it would probably be unusual to hope that all significant land masses will rise by enough to offset the sea level rise.
Events are further complicated because if the Gulf Stream dies which seems probable, then London could get around about the same temperatures as Moscow – whatever they turn out to be – and so we might possibly get a re-icing in parts of Europe, but it seems unlikely, as that is primarily regional, and summer temperatures will be above freezing. Also for reasons I do not understand, sea level rises are not uniform across the globe.
The Pacific Islands, and many other places do seem threatened by sea-level rises. Some small islands in the Solomons have already become uninhabitable and have significantly eroded, and in other islands people are moving to higher ground – where such ground is available.
And the main cause of such rises, as understood at the moment, is greenhouse gas emissions. This comes largely from fossil fuel use, but agri-business practices and building practices are important as well. If we go past various tipping points, because of our emissions, there probably really won’t be much we can do and the levels of destruction Australia will experience from sea level rise alone, will almost certainly be extremely disruptive of anything resembling normal life here.
So while we are helping to destroy the Pacific Islands, we are also helping to destroy ourselves. But hell it makes someone a mighty amount of money.
Tags: Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, disorder
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
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