After
alerting the world in September 1988 that the Maldive islands of the
Indian Ocean would be submerged by rising seas in less than three
decades – due to the so-called first effects of man-made global warming –
officials of the United Nations and associated climatologists are
scratching their heads that the island chain is still there.
A report derived from
government officials’ predictions shocked the world 30 years ago,
warning that the tropical paradise archipelago would soon suffer the
same fate as the lost city of Atlantis.
“A gradual rise in average sea level is
threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small
islands within the next 30 years,” the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported in September 1988.
Scare tactics or numbers gone wrong?
Serving alongside the UN at the time,
Environmental Affairs Director Hussein Shihab gave precise
“calculations” about the extent to which the Maldives would become
submerged.
“An estimated rise of 20 to 30 centimeters
in the next 20 to 40 years could be ‘catastrophic’ for most of the
islands, which were no more than a meter above sea level,” Shihab told
AFP at the time.
The alarmism did not stop there, as many
islanders were led to believe by affiliated of the global peacekeepers
that they had just several years to evacuate the island before it became
inhabitable.
“The article went on to suggest the
Maldives – along with its 200,000 inhabitants – could ‘end’ sooner than
expected if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992 ‘as predicted,’” The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reported. “Today, more than 417,000 people live in the Maldives.”
Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner mocked the alarmists at the UN and their affiliated climatologists.
“Call Noah and have him build another
Ark,” the leader of the pro-energy group mused while speaking with DCNF.
“Bring out the Coast Guard. Send all the boogie boards and floaties you
can find – for the Maldives is going down!”
‘Poster’ islands for global warming
For decades, the UN has claimed that the
Maldives would be the first to go under the sea once the “catastrophic”
effects of climate change induced by human pollutants began.
“The Maldives are among the island nations
often held up by United Nations officials as being on the ‘front-lines’
of man-made global warming,” DCNF Energy Editor Michael Bastasch noted.
In fact, Republic of Maldives President
Mohamed Nasheed addressed other world leaders at the UN General Assembly
Summit on Climate Change in August 2009 to alarm attendees that entire
populations across the world will drown as glaciers melt – and increase
the ocean depth by just 4.5 feet – because of manmade airborne
pollution.
"You know that with a sea-level rise of over 1.5 meters, hundreds of millions of people would be dead,” Nasheed told the UN Chronicle days after speaking at the summit. “They would simply be wiped out."
Behind the dire warnings of the Green
agenda is reportedly the green glow of money, but the alarmism was not
enough to quickly secure the exorbitant funds ultra-environmentalists
were trying to pander from climate-change believing nations across the
globe.
“The island nation was among the first to
apply for Green Climate Fund aid, but the funding hasn’t been flowing,
according to The New York Times,” Bastach explained.
Just last year, Maldives Energy and
Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim made it clear that he wanted
immediate access to funds … before it was too late.
“That’s too long to wait,” Ibrahim insisted to The New York Times in November. “There’s no use having a fund somewhere if you can’t access it quickly.”
However, 30 years of panic did not usher
in the consuming seas or the desired funding for the UN, as the Maldives
are still perched right above sea level, with its beautiful sandy
beaches still beckoning tourists to lay down their towels and unfold
their beach chairs – not to head for high ground … if there were any.
“The Maldives are indeed low-lying islands
with its highest point only reaching about eight feet above sea level,”
Bastach informed. “But obviously, decades-old warnings [that] the
Maldives were on the verge of being swallowed by the seas didn’t pan
out.”
Getting bigger, not smaller?
Despite what many climatologists report
concerning rising sea levels, research conducted by New Zealand
scientists on Tavalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and
2014 indicates that the Maldives and other coral islands in the region
are actually getting larger – not shrinking and sinking.
“The Pacific nation of Tuvalu – long seen
as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels
– is actually growing in size, new research shows,” a report on a University of Auckland study revealed in February.
“It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands
grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9
percent – even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global
average.”
In fact, Paul Kench – co-author of the
research – argued against climate change alarmists’ assertion that
low-lying island nations will soon succumb to rising seas and be
completely submerged.
"We tend to think of Pacific atolls as
static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but
there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are
constantly changing," Kench contended the scientific report on the study.
"The study findings may seem counter-intuitive, given that (the) sea
level has been rising in the region over the past half century, but the
dominant mode of change over that time on Tuvalu has been expansion –
not erosion."
This argument for island expansion – as
opposed to island shrinking that global warming climatologists often
claim – is corroborated by other research, as well.
“The results [of the Kiwi study] echoed a
2015 study by the same lead author that also found coral island
expansion,” Bastach noted. “Study lead author and scientist Paul Kench
told The New Scientist ‘that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar
effect.’”
More warnings of old not coming to fruition
Several months before the UN’s September
1988 alarmism attempting to scare inhabitants off the Maldives with
visions of overwhelming ocean waters, The New York Times was
already busy putting illusions of catastrophic rising seas and
temperatures in the minds of Americans through ominous predictions.
“[If] the current pace of the buildup of
these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9
degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050,” the Times’
Philip Shabecoff warned in a June 1988 article, according to WND. “[This should produce a rise in seal levels of] one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”
WND noted that Shabecoff was using predictions of Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer to come up his anticipated figures.
Such cataclysmic forecasts by past and
present climate change activists have been derided as the foreboding
climatic events never actually take place – or even appear to be taking
shape, for that matter.
“In August, Rob Bradley, Jr., the CEO and
founder of the Institute for Energy Research, described Shabecoff’s
claim as the ‘opening salvo’ of global-warming activism, and also
pointed to the failure of claims made by NASA climate scientist James
Hansen and Al Gore,” WND’s Art Moore recounted. “Bradley – who has
testified before the U.S. Congress as one of the nation’s leading
experts on the history and regulation of energy markets – argued that
the mid-point of Shabecoff’s predicted warming would be six degrees.”
He called out the global warming alarmists for grossly overestimating rising temperatures and sea levels.
“At the 30-year mark, how is it looking?” Bradley asked on his website, WattsUpWithThat.com. “The increase is about one degree – and largely holding (the much-discussed ‘pause’ or ‘warming hiatus’).”
It was also stressed that a very modest global warming trend has been in effect for thousands of years.
“[The world has naturally warmed since the
end of the Little Ice Age, which is] a good thing – if climate
economists are to be believed,” Bradley added. “[Concerning rising sea
levels,] the exaggeration appears greater. Both before and after the
1980s, decadal sea-level rise has been a few inches – and it has not
been appreciably accelerating.”
The energy expert asserts that the
extremist alarmism disseminated by climate change scientists and the
activists behind them will fade away into the myths of yesteryear.
“[The alarmist temperature and sea-level
predictions] constitute yet another exaggerated Malthusian scare –
joining those of the population bomb (Paul Ehrlich), resource exhaustion
(Club of Rome), Peak Oil (M. King Hubbert), and global cooling (John
Holdren),” Bradley concluded.
