OT: Global sea-level rise to flood parts of Tuvalu this weekend

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Global sea-level rise to flood parts of Tuvalu this weekend

Wednesday, February 16 10:52 AM SGT AUCKLAND, Feb 16 (AFP)

Global warming and the associated sea-level rise will threaten residents of Tuvalu this weekend, with tides forecast to be higher than most of the islands they live on, a climate expert confirmed Wednesday.

Homes, offices and the airport could expect to be flooded, Hilia Vavae of the Tuvalu Meteorological Office told AFP by telephone.

Tuvalus main island and capital, Funafuti, will Saturday and Sunday afternoon receive spring tides of 3.2 metres (11 feet). No point of land in Tuvalu is more than 4.5 metres (15 feet) above mean sea level.

"The low lying areas of Funafuti will be flooded," Vavae said.

She said spring tides have been steadily getting higher, causing serious problems, and this month they will be their highest ever.

On overcrowed Funafuti, home to most of the 11,000 population, the groundwater has already become undrinkable thanks to sea-water intrusion, and often century-old pits used for growing the root crop taro are being flooded by sea-water.

"It is very hard here," she said.

Making matters even tougher is that much of Tuvalu is experiencing a heavy drought.

Weather forecasts for the weekend were not yet available, but the impact of the tide could be made even more dramatic if accompanied by winds or heavy seas.

Tuvalu has been outspoken in world forums on global warming, claiming its very existence is on the line.

Spring tides occur when the Moon aligns with the Sun at times of full or new moons, producing maximum tidal ranges.

The highest spring tides are at the equinoxes when the Sun is over the Equator.

Vavae said she expected Funafutis "lowlands", including much of the airfield, to be under water for up to six hours Saturday and Sunday. Some office buildings and homes are expected to be flooded too.

The spring ties are due at 5.03 p.m. Saturday (0503 GMT) and 5.44 p.m. (0544 GMT) Sunday.

People were calm and used to the spring tides although as they were getting higher the problems were getting more severe.

"They do not like the way the main road is blocked by the tides," Vavae said.

Tuvalu ("eight together"), formerly the Ellice Islands, is a group of nine Polynesian atolls, lying south of the equator. Funafuti is 1,046 kilometres (650 miles) north of Fiji. The country has only 26 square kilometressquare miles), although the atolls extend in a chain 595 kilometresmiles) long.

Around 40 percent of Funafuti is already uninhabitable because of pits and an airstrip dug out of the coral by American forces during World War II.

Previous Prime Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu spent many years warning the world his nation was in strife and in 1992 told a summit in Tahiti that Tuvalu, already suffering from isolation, was "the world's first victim of climate change."

"Our islands are experiencing frequent natural disasters like cyclones, tidal waves and droughts which are causing severe damage," he said.

During the El Nino weather phenomenon, Tuvalu become more exposed to cyclones and there was evidence land was slipping into the sea permanently.

"We do see the physical impact in Tuvalu, that is why we think of it as something more than a theory," he said.

"Our islands will disappear, we will have to find another home. But surely that is our last resort, we don't want to be displaced from our home, our motherland."

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), February 16, 2000

Answers

This is some serious shit people! OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES AND SEE THE LIGHT err ahhh WATER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-- lookatdefacts@man (damndoyou@notknow.duh), February 17, 2000.

Any chance it would drown Texans? Hope, hope, hope!

-- Okie Dan (brendan@theshop.net), February 17, 2000.

This island nation is a chain of islands in an atoll. Atolls form atop extinct, underwater volcanoes. Extinct volcanoes, on land or underwater, are subject to suffering land subsidence.

What's to say that it isn't a case of water rising as much as it's the land sinking? Just look at the land around Long Beach, CA where it's subsided due to oil extraction. Parts of that area have gone below sea level, or was it extremely localized rising water?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), February 17, 2000.


I have seen a lot of things blamed on Global Warming, but this one is just too outrageous. Yes Tuvalu will be flooded this weekend by exceptionally high tides, as it has been on a number of previous occassions. However are these high tides really being caused by gloabal warming? Or are they the result of the earth being at its closest proximity to the sun, and aligned with the moon, and with several planets all close to alingment as well?

In other words, are high tides caused by temperature changes, or gravitational effects?

If anyone really believes that global warming is occuring can they please present some data to show that it is indeed happening. Then, if it is happening, we can discuss the possible causes.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), February 17, 2000.


Oh fer Chrissakes, Malcom,

There's ice-core, sediment-core, glacial melt, icepack thinning, iceshelf disintegration, actual measurements of atmosphere and ocean at all altitudes and depths, climate history...I could go on. All of which is direct evidence which does not rely on modelling.

But, if you're too lazy or close-minded to use a search engine to find the volume of data available, nothing anyone can say will open your eyes. Reminds me of the student who sleeps through the lecture/experiment and then says he's seen no evidence to support the results.

You are in no position to discuss interpretation of evidence until you've seen the evidence. Wake up, call up a good search engine and do your own research

Than we'll talk.

[The following is yet another type research endeavor which corroborates the tons or megabytes of information on this important topic.]

ANN ARBOR -- Earth's 500-year warming trend accelerated considerably in the 20th century, the warmest of the past five centuries, a new study of borehole temperatures from more than 600 sites around the world confirms. What's more, the results suggest that at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the 500-year warm-up has been even greater than previously estimated with other techniques.

The study, co-authored by Shaopeng Huang and Henry N. Pollack of the University of Michigan and Po-Yu Shen of the University of Western Ontario, appears in the Feb. 17 issue of Nature.

Since 1500, Earth's temperature has increased about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with half of that increase taking place in the 20th century alone, says Pollack, a professor of geological sciences. In the Northern Hemisphere, the temperature change has been 1.1 C (2 F) over the past five centuries and 0.6 C (1.1 F) in the 20th century.

The scientists based their analysis on temperature readings taken by lowering sensitive thermometers into holes drilled from Earth's surface. These readings reveal how surface temperature changed in the past. That's possible because, thanks to heat conduction, temperature changes at the surface generate "signals" that travel downward into subsurface rocks, says Huang, a research scientist at the U-M. Signals from short-term daily or seasonal variations penetrate only a few meters, and Earth quickly "forgets" them, but temperature changes that take place over hundreds of years are preserved in deeper rock.

Temperature signals travel slowly through the rocks, penetrating only about 500 meters in 1,000 years, "so the upper 500 meters is an archive -- a historical record of temperature changes that have occurred in the last thousand years," says Pollack. "Like any historical archive, there are of course missing pages, and the ink has run in a few places. But in principle, if you would drill a borehole anywhere on a continent, you could observe a temperature profile and be able to reconstruct what had happened at that location."

But a single borehole can't tell a global story. For that, the scientists calculate averages from hundreds of borehole sites around the world. Their current work builds on a previous analysis of borehole temperature data from 358 sites in eastern North America, central Europe, southern Africa and Australia, which showed a similar worldwide warming over the past 500 years. By adding more sites to the analysis and greatly expanding the geographical coverage, the scientists increased their confidence in the results and were able to look at regional, as well as global, trends. In the new study, they also compared their results with those obtained with other methods of estimating past temperature change, such as studies of tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments and coral growth.

"All the methods generally show a very unusual 20th century, and ours does, too. The 20th century is the warmest century of the last five, and the one which is most rapidly changing," says Pollack. "What we show that is somewhat different is that the total temperature change over the past five centuries has been greater than some of the other methods are showing." ###

References

1. http://www.eurekalert.org/cgi/users/toc 2. mailto:rossflan@umich.edu 3. http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo . http://www.eurekalert.org/cgi/users/toc



-- (First=Last@Last.=First), February 17, 2000.



Malcolm,

When discussing "global warming", it may be useful to keep in mind that that phrase has become something of a conceptual grab bag, stuffed with hobgoblins for all occasions. For example, some people seem to imagine that global warming will necessarily have castrophic consequences. Some further imagine that global warming is predominantly a function of increases of atmospheric CO2, and to some of them, increases of atmosphereic CO2 = global warming = catastrophe. So, if you have in mind average global temperatures, it may be better to use that phrase than the phrase global warming.

Furthermore, when discussing changes of average global temperatures, it may be very useful to mention the the particular time period you have in mind. I noticed a reply to your post which refers to average global temperatures being higher recently than they were 500 years ago. It neglected to mention that 500 years ago was early in the onset of the "little ice age" (just a minor omission). :-)

For some perspective on the 500 year article:

From: Reference

On the basis of various studies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Houghton et al., 1990) has determined that the mean air temperature of the globe over the last thousand years most likely varied as shown in the figure at the following link:

Temps go up and down and up and down

Some folks might imagine that there were many SUVs driving around about 1000 years ago. :-)

And meanwhile, I prefer not to have glaciers cluttering up my neighborhood. :-)

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), February 18, 2000.


Firstwith opinions, last with facts. Yes, by all means, do some research. That's research for facts for both sides, not just to support what you want.

You could try a search for "global warming and leipzig". if you do you would learn that there is no proof of global warming and that many thousands of people in climatology related fields say there is no proof. These people signed the "Leipzig Declaration" in Leipzig, Germany, 1995.

In 1997 a new declaration calling the Kyoto Protocol "dangerously simplistic, quite ineffective and economically destructive" was issued for signalure by climatology scientists. You know, people that actually study the climate.

Put it to bed ********. There is no global warming attributable to human causes.

-- Mr. Pinochle (pinochledd@aol.com), February 18, 2000.


First=Last, Perhaps you should read G lobal warming rising tide just hot air. and you will see that this is a subject I have researched quite extensively. Part of my job as a production controller for a group of hydro power stations requires me to keep up with climate changes and weather patterns. No rain means no fuel for hydro turbines, so we employ a national research institute to advise us on climate changes. The evidence for man made global warming just does not stack up.

Have a look at this excerpt from Liberty Australia.

GLOBALONEY WARMING

Global warming and runaway greenhouse effect is a very emotive subject for some people that are convinced of the hype that global warming is real. The fact of course is that global warming leading to runaway greenhouse effect is just a theory, a very poor hypothesis that falls quickly to the truth that solar output fluctuations are the prime cause of temperature variations on earth. Global warming is an environment hoax that is being exploited for control and global taxation. Global warming does NOT have the consensus of most scientists.

This site also has a large number of links to articles on the research into global warming.

And you still have not shown how the high tides in Tuvalu will be caused by global warming rather than astronomical phenomena.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), February 19, 2000.


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