Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

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What if pacific islands aren't actually sinking?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls.

Note how dishonest the scientists are. Their abstract starts by saying "Sea-level rise and climatic change threaten the existence of atoll nations" before getting to the part just quoted where they admit their data says the islands are getting bigger.

This kind of brazen dishonesty is pervasive throughout modern academic science. It's not just the "lab leaks are impossible" crowd, you see it in many fields. Data tables don't match summaries which don't match abstracts which don't match IPCC reports which don't press releases which don't match TV news. Here, climatologists used picturesque Pacific islands to motivate major social changes without even bothering to measure whether their claims were true or not up until very recently. And when they did, and discovered the claims were not true, this fact was promptly buried and given no coverage. The misinformation gets repeated - which isn't your fault. After all, how were you to know?

I know you think this is some big gotcha that indicts the entire concept of climate change, but it is really just you desperately finding some factoid that backs up your idea where you can't see the forest for the trees.

The climate is clearly changing and it is really causing massive disruptions and costing trillions of dollars. The evidence is overwhelming and it is impossible to ignore at this point. This little gotcha doesn't change that or matter at all.

You can keep saying it, but that doesn't make it true. The global troposphere has increased its temperature by only 0.52C in the last forty years. Local climate change is a reality and happens continuously. Changing humanity's CO2 output won't significantly affect it. The "trillions in cost" is due to civilization putting pressure on marginal areas, like Florida, by overbuilding directly on the hurricane-prone coastline and on land that is actually subsiding. Global sea levels are rising about one foot per century during the top of the current interglacial era. Here in New England, we handle nine foot tides daily.

sigh. You can see the global temperatures rising. Wildfires in Canada were out of control this year. Last year it happened in Australia. These temperatures and this level of fires aren't normal occurrences.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....

We didn't overbuild in the florida keys because that isn't even possible. But the government is buying out people because it isn't viable anymore.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-c...

There are 13,458 florida keys homes sold recently according to Zillow. The prices for the homes are almost at record highs. The homes bought from the "Voluntary Home Buyout Program" were for homes impacted by Hurricane Irma not by rising sea levels.

Ok I'll do this one more time with you.

Solar output has been decreasing as global temperatures increase.

Over 20 years ago scientists weren't just predicting temperature increase, but also making a wild prediction that global temperatures would not revert back to the mean and would increase well beyond our max temperatures. That has happened.

You can't be sure at all that global warming is false based on the available information. If you are wrong and we do nothing humanity will cook.

I don't personally want a leopard to eat my face. I don't spend my whole life doing climate research. The people who do spend their lives on this say this climate change is happening, and they were right 20 years ago predicting the global temps would increase over our previous max. Idk if they were right exactly with magnitude, but their predictions were more accurate than the other side of this debate.

The people saying global warming wasn't going to happen were wrong. They are heavily funded by the people releasing all the greenhouse gasses. They lack credibility and they have a worse track record.

The original question asked which coastlines are burying houses underwater.

"The climate is clearly changing and it is really causing massive disruptions and costing trillions of dollars"

...to which coastlines? Los Angeles? Hawaii? Miami? Thailand? Barcelona? Marseille? Which?

The Pacific Islands. I already said it up-thread.

https://www.elr.info/sites/default/files/article/2020/06/50....

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/08/us/pacific-islands-climate-ch...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2019.0028...

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/three-islands-disappear...

Your last link is about Tebunginako. That island was already identified in 1991 as suffering from ordinary coastal erosion and sandbank migration:

https://spccfpstore1.blob.core.windows.net/digitallibrary-do...

Although there is erosion near Tebunginako village centre, there is an accreting area north of the village centre where trees are systematically being planted to reclaim the accreted area. This situation implies the natural northward migration of a sand bulge along the beach

The article presents this as a narrative about climate change because that creates clicks, but it's misinformation. The fact that most of the Tuvalu islands have grown over the past 40 years shows that climate change is not sinking the Pacific Islands, even if some very small ones do disappear or move due to natural forces.

From a quick look, your other links aren't more reliable unfortunately. These sorts of islands are prone to erosion and movement of the coastline, which would occur regardless of whether humanity was here or not.

But it's our actions that are causing the erosion. Our anthropogenic climate change has caused these coastlines to change. People are being affected by our actions. Over just 200 years instead of 10s of thousands.

Please prove that it's human actions that cause coastal erosion, because I'm pretty sure coastlines have always been moving and shifting in response to erosion. That's how beaches are made, isn't it?

Also, even if that were to be true which I doubt, so what? They were supposed to sink beneath the waters as they rapidly rise due to melting polar ice. That was the doom scenario that was used to motivate people, but it hasn't happened. In a rational world that should cause us to toss out the other predictions made by such "experts", not try to retcon what was said to fit whatever actually happens. Especially because a change like "maybe a beach migrates northward a bit in some islands, others grow a bit, others shrink a bit" is nowhere near important enough to make disruptive changes to the lives of everyone on the planet.

The supposed flooding of low lying Pacific islands have been one of the primary emotional stories told by environmentalists, governments and the UN for decades. The poor innocent islanders having their homes destroyed by massive sea level rises created directly by rapacious westerners in their gas guzzling cars.

The falsification of these claims is therefore no mere "factoid" or "little gotcha". It means all the people and institutions who made these claims were wrong and wrong whilst asserting 100% confidence in what they were saying. It is not just a falsification of a scientific hypothesis but the falsification of their self-proclaimed expertise too.

Now think about how many other "gotchas" are lurking out there in the science. Because for sure this isn't the only one.

In reality there is no evidence for "massive disruptions costing trillions of dollars". None. Zero. It's a fiction that's been made up out of whole cloth and now way too many people just can't let it go.

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