Climate change displacement has begun - but hardly anyone has noticed

gerky

George Monbiot wrote:

Climate change displacement has begun – but hardly anyone has noticed

The first evacuation of an entire community due to manmade global warming is happening on the Carteret Islands



Rising sea levels endangered life on Iolasa island on the Carterets Atoll, Papua New Guinea

Rising sea levels have eroded much of the coastlines of the low-lying Carteret Islands situated 50 miles from Bougainville Island, in the South Pacific.

Journalists – they're never around when you want one. Two weeks ago a momentous event occurred: the beginning of the world's first evacuation of an entire people as a result of manmade global warming. It has been marked so far by one blog post for the Ecologist and an article in the Solomon Times*. Where is everyone?

The Carteret Islands are off the coast of Bougainville, which, in turn, is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. They are small coral atolls on which 2,600 people live. Though not for much longer.

As the Ecologist's blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders' vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.

They are not, as the Daily Mail and the Times predicted, "the world's first climate-change refugees". People have been displaced from their homes by natural climate change for tens of thousands of years, and by manmade climate change for millennia (think of the desertification caused in North Africa by Roman grain production).

Some people ascribe the fighting in Darfur – and the consequent displacement of its people – to climate change, as people struggle over diminishing resources. But this appears to be the first time that an entire people have started leaving their homes as a result of current global warming.

Their numbers might be small, but this is the event that foreshadows the likely mass displacement of people from coastal cities and low-lying regions as a result of rising sea levels. The disaster has begun, but so far hardly anyone has noticed.

Monbiot.com

* thanks to Jon Freeman for alerting me to this story
Posted by George Monbiot Friday 8 May 2009 12.34 BST guardian.co.uk

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

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baldieman

gerky wrote: »

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Any links please?

gerky

baldieman wrote: »

Any links please?

Yea, I should of posted them anyway.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/may/07/monbiot-climate-change-evacuation

Good blog by Dan Box charting the evacuation.
http://journeytothesinkinglands.wordpress.com/

probe

Video on the impact on the island of Tuvalu - the country that gives us the .tv top level domain. People are emigrating to New Zealand and other countries and leaving their island homeland before it becomes submerged.

http://www.pbs.org/cgi-registry/mediaplayer/videoplayer.cgi?playertype=realmedia&speed=hi&;playeraddress=videoplayer.cgi;media=%2Ffrontlineworld%2Ftuvalu_sink_rc13_lo.rm%2C%2Ffrontlineworld%2Ftuvalu_sink_rc13_hi.rm%2C%2Ffrontlineworld%2Ftuvalu_sink_rc13_lo.mov%2C%2Ffrontlineworld%2Ftuvalu_sink_rc13_hi.mov;title=FRONTLINE%2FWorld%20.%20Rough%20Cut.%20Tuvalu%3A%20That%20Sinking%20Feeling%20%7C%20PBS;playertemplate=%2Ffrontlineworld%2Frough%2Fvideotemplate1.html;description=Tuvalu%3A%20That%20Sinking%20Feeling%20%2816%3A24%29

derry

First issue is the fact that Monibot has anything to with this report.

you only have to check his creditials to see he is knee deep in
right wing overpopulation think tanks that want to cull the worlds population by 90% using if nessary bio weapons to save the planet from humanity but ensure the right wing elite who survive have the vaccines for them to safequarded from the bio weapon cull.
These groups mostly USA and British think tanks will aid and finance every environment group they can get to hijack to distort the data and preach impending disaster to further their cause to justify the necessity to cull the worlds population

All evidence for global sea level rising due to mankind's activity seem weak at best and close to non existent

sea levels have been rising steadily since 1700 when we came out of the mini ice age

Local region now suffer from flooding often can neaqrly always be traced to local interference from humans and redressing the problem can often solve or reverse the problem

The best examples of this is the low land region of UK east Anglia where the nature of huge swamps or marshes acted as a natural sponge to soak up local high tide bulges from storms etc.

Local farming methods draining the marshes and making dykes forced the water to bulge and break dykes or flood region which had no dykes so shifting the problems sidewards and amplify the problems

The new trend is now to destroy the man made dykes and remake marsh land let nature soak up the floods as they always did for the centuries and search for natural solutions .
Even Holland is looking to remove most of it dykes systems as big engineering mistake and live with controlled flooding with houses that float when flooding events happen plus save a lot of fuel bills from pumps fighting the sea water which enters under the dykes with soakage

So the evidence for rapid sea level rise world wide doesn't stand the real science tests when you bother to check into the hype
We should look this story and similar with a dim view and ask hard questions is this some publicity stunt pay a bunch of natives to leave a place they should never have colonized as once they removed the natural mangrove swamps they made the flooding event worse or similar theme.

As all my evidence is that major right wing think tanks will make fabricate and distort all environmental stories to suit some agenda often depopulation is mandatory.;the brits did it to us in 1840 famine culled us with fake data and they and others still practice this activity on the planet with false data
So it now is necessary I find to to check deeply all facts and all stories and often these stories of doom and gloom are distortions of the truth and often these stories come from obscure parts of the planet where it is not easy for us joe soaps to verify the real story.

Derry

slagger

Why not relocate the displaced populations to the sahara ?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange

djpbarry

derry wrote: »

First issue is the fact that Monibot has anything to with this report.

you only have to check his creditials to see he is knee deep in
right wing overpopulation think tanks that want to cull the worlds population by 90% using if nessary bio weapons to save the planet from humanity but ensure the right wing elite who survive have the vaccines for them to safequarded from the bio weapon cull.
These groups mostly USA and British think tanks will aid and finance every environment group they can get to hijack to distort the data and preach impending disaster to further their cause to justify the necessity to cull the worlds population

Save it for the CT Forum.

derry wrote: »

All evidence that I have seen for global sea level rising due to mankind's activity seem weak at best and close to non existent

Fixed that for you.

derry wrote: »

sea levels have been rising steadily since 1700 when we came out of the mini ice age

Source?

derry wrote: »

Local region now suffer from flooding often can neaqrly always be traced to local interference from humans and redressing the problem can often solve or reverse the problem

Really? So what exactly have the good folks of the Carteret Islands done to cause the flooding of their land?

derry wrote: »

Even Holland is looking to remove most of it dykes systems as big engineering mistake and live with controlled flooding with houses that float when flooding events happen plus save a lot of fuel bills from pumps fighting the sea water which enters under the dykes with soakage

Source?

derry wrote: »

So the evidence for rapid sea level rise world wide doesn't stand the real science tests when you bother to check into the hype

Perhaps you could cast your critical over this and tell us where the authors have gone wrong?

derry

derry wrote:

So the evidence for rapid sea level rise world wide doesn't stand the real science tests when you bother to check into the hype

Perhaps you could cast your critical over this and tell us where the authors have gone wrong?[/QUOTE]



interesting read but as in all sea level rise stuff there is cycles of gains and losses with small trent upwards and some real splitting hairs stuff from acceleration rates of 0.000xx increases which will rise up and drown us any day now eeeekkkkk

GRL_Church_White_2006_024826.pdf wrote:

example from that same paper the mind wrenching big numbers will make thousand foot AlGore tidal waves that will sink us alll eeeeekkkk

Third Assessment Report (IPCC TAR) [Church et al.,
2001].
For 1910 to 1990, the acceleration in ocean thermal
expansion (only) in these climate models range from
0.005 ± 0.003 mm yr

derry

link

http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf


here is the few pages in your face 1mm rises in a few decades and then it stops for other decades even reverses and sea level rises are so insignificant as to be uninteresting from my beach chair in SW Spain beach which has wi fi to inform the unifirmed that Monibot isnt to be trusted on the green subject as it trojan horse for his other agenda

<snip>

Derry

djpbarry

derry wrote: »

interesting read but as in all sea level rise stuff there is cycles of gains and losses with small trent upwards and some real splitting hairs stuff from acceleration rates of 0.000xx increases...

So where did the authors go wrong? Where are the inaccuracies in their calculations and/or data?

derry wrote: »

link

http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf

I prefer to judge scientists by their published work if you don’t mind. Mörner’s claim that sea levels (as measured in The Maldives) have fallen by 30cm over the last few decades doesn’t stand up to scrutiny:

That objective led a fieldwork team to the Maldives, and resulted in a conclusion that sea level in the islands fell by approximately 30 cm during the past few decades. In the present paper, the suggestion of such a fall has been examined from meteorological and oceanographic perspectives and found to be implausible. A number of met-ocean data sets and regional climate indices have been examined, at least one of which would have been expected to reflect a large sea level fall, without any supporting evidence being found. In particular, a suggestion that an increase in evaporation could have caused the fall has been demonstrated to be incorrect.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VF0-4GBD6SS-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b8b8366517bac336789e3d2d6bb92039

piraka

There is an interesting article in Nature News that calls in to question the projected population migration due to global warming

In a paper Tacoli presented to the meeting, to be published later this year in the journal Environment and Urbanization, she says it is "surprising" that these figures have "become an unquestioned orthodoxy, especially amongst natural scientists concerned with climate change". She told Nature News that the figures are "based on assumptions that are simplistic, if not outright dodgy", and add to the alarmist view of migration that is rife among policy-makers.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090625/full/news.2009.601.html?s=news_rss

positron

Video, its such a beautiful place!:

http://www.vimeo.com/4177527

Mahatma coat

I know those Islands, its Economic Migration, since PNG stopped kickin the Snot out of Bougainville a lot of the people from the outlying islands have started to migrate back to the mainland, It may have a lot more to do with the proposed re openin of Panguna than anything else