Sinking Islands or Stinking Islands?

The American Thinker ^ | April 22, 2009 | Brian Sussman

[Scanian]

The headline on Monday read, "Climate refugees in Pacific flee rising seas". Boy did the editors get this one wrong. A more accurate caption would have been, "Jesse Jackson-like shake-down gets tribe taken off tropical trash heap".

A focus of the story was the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. Apparently New Zealand responded to the phony cries of a few goo-goo activists, and is now convinced that unless the Tuvaluans are allowed to immigrate, they'll soon be blubbing with the fish. Of course, the calculable cause of this sinkage is a steadily rising sea fed by anthropogenic global warming.

Rubbish. Literally.

For decades there have been ridiculous rumors of islands sinking due to rising waters. The Tuvaluan fantasy has been especially propagated by Al Gore's brilliant work of fiction, An Inconvenient Truth. In the flick he actually refers to several islands, including Tuvalu, claiming that because of melting polar ice, "the citizens of these Pacific nations all had to evacuate to New Zealand".

Gore's statement was a patent fabrication -- one that first started floating the boats of eco-freaks back in the Eighties.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[marktwain]

I thought you might be able to give us some local knowledge on this “evacuation”.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Ah, yes. Tuvalu — the perpetually-sinking islands.

There are two views of Tuvalu, both of them valid, and neither of them involving global warming.

First, it is a fact that islands in the South Pacific have been rising and falling for millennia. All by themselves. Some due to being volcanic and thus subject to the whims and fancies of volcanism. Some because they are made of guano (petrified bird-crap) and subject to having enough birds hovering around over the centuries to make a tidy pile. And some because they are formed out of coral, which is a living organism and thus subject to growing and shrinking, living and dying.

Second, it is a fact that the Pacific Island peoples used to move between islands quite frequently and with relative ease. Nobody there is “stuck” on an island unable to get off: in times past, were this a problem, they would have loaded up into a canoe and found another more suitable island. And indeed many of them are doing precisely that: they find their way to Auckland, which is the world’s largest Polynesian city. There, they are joined by Samoans, Fijians, Tongans, Tahitians, Nieueans, Hawaiians, and members of nearly all the rest of the South Pacific peoples.

Nearly everyone in the South Pacific moves off of their islands to larger places like New Zealand or Australia in order to prosper. Their local economies are too small to support many people, even with tourism. Then they retire and, as often as not, move back to their islands with their pensions.

Is Tuvalu actually sinking, or is this one of those tidal fluctuations? I don’t think anyone knows. It is almost certainly a normal part of South Pacific life. Nothing here remains unchanged for long.