The Maldives in the Indian Ocean have long been used by global warming alarmists to drive home the dangers of rising sea levels should polar ice sheets keep melting because of man-made global warming. In 2012 former President of the Maldive Islands, Mohammed Nasheed, said, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be under water in seven years.” (1)
With such a prediction and recalling how the latest UN IPCC report boosted its estimate of sea level rise, taking into account that CO2 emissions show no signs of abating, you would think the Maldives would be the last place developers would build anything. The Maldives are barely more than a meter above sea level on average. Yet as Pierre Gosselin reports, “The tourist industry does not believe in the downfall of the Maldives. Thirty additional new luxury class hotel complexes are planned for the next 6 to 10 years, not counting the countless smaller homes. Tourism is currently increasing 20% annually. Whatever is really behind all the rising seal level scar stories, huge commercial investors are obviously dismissing them. If anything, these scare stories are providing lots of publicity for the island's tourism industry. Already more than 1 million tourists are flocking to the islands every year and Nasheed says the island can handle many more. (1)
The developers are on safe ground in spite of Nasheed's dire warnings. There is a lot of science supporting the tourism industry's belief that sea level rise is not a problem. Flinders University in Adelaide had the task of settling the sea level situation once and for all by installing state-of-the-art-tide-gauges equipment on 12 Pacific Islands. There was no overall change in sea level at any of the islands after sixteen years. The reaction was what might be expected. They have been studiously ignored. The results have never been published in a 'peer reviewed' journal. (2)
In spite of this, on October 17, 2009, Mohammed Nasheed, then President of the Maldives staged and underwater meeting of his cabinet. Michael Fox observes, “President Nasheed's frightening message was dutifully carried by the media to the four corners of the world. The message was that rising sea levels are a direct threat to his nation and are being caused by rising global temperatures causing ice caps to melt which, in turn, causes the sea levels to rise. As has happened so often in the past, this alarming message from the President of the Maldives did not provide a shred of underlying evidence to support his dire situation. This message was intended to portray to the world that the Maldives Islands are threatened by rising sea levels. For example, Nasheed did not mention the findings of a dozen new sea level monitoring stations which have recorded sea levels in the pacific for more than 10 years.” (2)
One of the foremost sea level experts in the world, Swedish scientist Nils-Axel Morner says this, “As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million 'ecological refugees.' I have carefully examined the data of 'drowning' Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an 'inconvenient truth'; it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries. This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11 cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since. (3)
What About Tuvalu?
Tuvalu, a Polynesian Island in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, has also been claiming they are about to be overtaken by rising sea levels. Brian Sussman says Tuvalu's problem is not climate change. “Tuvalu's mess is that the country was never meant for modern habitation. There is no fresh water available—only what can be cached from rain. Much of the population on the main island uses a lagoon for its bathing and toilet facilities. The tiny nation ships its garbage to landfills in Fiji and New Zealand. Tuvalu is a tropical island mess being run by slick politicians using global warming for a shakedown operation.” (4)
About Tuvalu, Nils-Axel Morner adds, “I found no evidence of flooding despite claims in Al Gore 's An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those low-lying Pacific nations whose residents have had to evacuate their homes s because of rising seas. In fact the tide gauges of the past 25 years clearly show there has been no rise.” (3)
Cecil Cabanes and her colleagues reported in Science on the rate of sea level change in the world's oceans from 1993 (the first complete year of satellite data) to 1998. Guess what? Tuvalu was at the center of where sea level was falling. That's not all. In another part of their paper, they reported on sea level changes since 1955. Once again, Tuvalu was located in a region where sea level had declined for nearly 50 years. (5)
Yet three years later, a featured article in the Smithsonian discussed Tuvalu disappearing beneath the sea because of global warming. (6) Noticeably missing was any reference to the work of Cabanes and her colleagues.
Gore and Nasheed on Same Page
Sea levels were portrayed in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as rising twenty feet in the coming years. If Gore was so confident of the increase, why did he purchase a multimillion dollar bay-side condo in San Francisco? According to the maps, his pad will be swamped. (4)
If seal level is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he authorized the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it be perhaps that he wants to be able to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by global warming, asks Nils-Axel Morner. (3)
Also, for Nasheed, like the Smithsonian article mentioned previously which ignored the real scientific facts, others have followed suit in praising and honoring him. His efforts describing his version of the plight of the Maldives because of climate change have garnished him numerous awards. On Earth Day 2010 he was awarded the United Nations' Champions of the Earth Award. That year, he was also named by Foreign Policy Magazine to its list of top global thinkers. There are many other of his awards listed in Wikipedia (7) Like Al Gore, he didn't have to have the facts correct to receive awards on climate change. Just lots of rhetoric and scary unsubstantiated claims.
Ironic isn't it? Both these folks have garnished world-wide attention about their lea level concerns, yet both have taken actions indicating the exact opposite of all the rhetoric.
References
- P. Gosselin, “Developers dismiss sea level rise claims—plan to build 30 new luxury hotels in the Maldives—Nasheed's cash machine,” notrickszone.com, November 3, 2013
- Michael Fox, “Maldives sea level fraud,” Hawaii Reporter, October 26, 2009
- Nils-Axel Morner, “Rising credulity,” spectator.co.uk, December 3, 2011
- Brian Sussman, “Cancun's climate clock,” American Thinker, December 8, 2010
- Cecile Cabanes et al., “Sea level rise during the past 40 years determined from satellite and in-situ observations,” Science, 294, 840, October 26, 2001
- Leslie Allen, “Will Tuvalu disappear beneath the sea?” Smithsonian, 35, 44, August 2004
- “Mohammed Nasheed,” en.wikipedia.org, accessed November 4, 2013
