Island nations like the Maldives quickly lined up for handouts when the Global Warming Cult got its sea legs. In the decades since that overlubricated wheel still grinds and screeches despite the very real fact that these places are not getting swallowed by Poseidon’s climate rage—quite the opposite.
The sea level rise narrative has had a bad few years all around.
East Coast beaches haven’t changed much at all in seventy years, and in some cases, like Jones Beach on Long Island, they’ve gotten bigger. This is good news for people in Manhattan who were supposed to be underwater by 2018, but years later, sea-level-wise, things look a lot like they did in 1918.
And the Maldives? They were supposed to be underwater by 2018 as well, which should have slowed the grand opening of a $500.00-a-night 120-villa resort project that opened on Raa Atoll in 2019. It’s still there, but there is one difference. It costs about $1000.00 a night to stay there now and not because the sea is coming to take it away. The same year that the pricey resort opened, researchers were conducting a global analysis of beaches and islands around the globe.
A 2019 global-scale analysis of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans revealed 89% were either stable or growing in size, and that no island larger than 10 ha (and only 1.2% of islands larger than 5 ha) had decreased in size since the 1980s (Duvat, 2019).
Likewise, the globe’s beaches been growing by 0.33 m/year since 1984 (Luijendijk et al., 2018).
In a press release for a 2016 paper on coastal land area changes from 1985 to 2015, scientists acknowledged this:
“We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world“ – BBC
I guess the resort investors knew more than the so-called experts (emphasis added).
The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average”. ..
That has to be disappointing but look on the bright side. You said global warming was going to affect island nations, and it has. Many of them are getting bigger. So, do you know less about ocean and island mechanics than you do climate? Is that even possible?
