Last week, deniers celebrated the good news that the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu isn’t sinking beneath the rising seas, but in fact growing. From Murdoch’s Daily Mail to the Mercer family’s Breitbart to fracking-billionaire-Wilks-family-funded Daily Wire, deniers were respectfully celebratory that the country wouldn’t be erased from our maps.
Just kidding. Deniers, of course, used this story of a potentially averted loss of an entire people as a reason to bash alarmists.
Our favorite was JoNova’s headline, which channeled Tim and Eric’s classic “Free Real Estate!” bit. She suggested that “since our emissions helped create nearly a square kilometer of free real estate in Tuvalu, it seems only fair that they return any climate funds, and pay a royalty. [Wink emoji]”
Unfortunately for Jo and other deniers, the study doesn’t say that sea levels aren’t rising. Rather, researchers found that some natural forces specific to the island’s geography (buildup of sediment and wave patterns) is growing the island faster than the seas rose.
What’s more, it looks like islands like Tuvalu may have to plan for accelerated sea level rise in the future. A study released this week in PNAS shows that sea level rise is in fact speeding up. (Somewhat bizarrely, Murdoch’s Fox News and Daily Mail, as well as Mercer’s Breitbart, all syndicated the AP story on the study.)
This research used satellites to track sea level rise over the past 25 years, canceled out the El Nino and volcanic forces that cool the atmosphere (and therefore dampen sea level rise) and found the trend is accelerating. This new trend suggests we could see, at a minimum, two feet of rise by 2100, assuming glaciers don’t start melting more rapidly than they have been...and research points to an acceleration of both Antarctica and Greenland’s glacier melt.
The odds are slim, then, that Tuvalu’s local uplift will outpace the global rise of the seas- and even if it did, that wouldn’t help all the other small island nations. A big part of these islands’ fate, of course, is wrapped up in whether or not humanity gets our carbon emissions under control. If we do, then small island nations like Tuvalu will likely survive. If not, humanity will be responsible for collectively submerging a number of island cultures, and their homeland, under the ocean in what can only be described as a form of genocide.
But hey, maybe warming will be good, right Scott Pruitt?
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