49,999,999 to Go
by Pater
Tenebrarum
Back in April 2011, the UN
engaged in what Anthony Watts referred to as 'bureaucratic idiocy at its
finest'. It all started with Gavin Atkins asking a fair enough question: “What happened with the climate refugees?”
“In 2005, the United Nations
Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million
climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of
disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of
hurricanes, and disruption to food production.
The UNEP even provided a handy
map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low
lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.
It so happens that just a few
of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it
should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact
climate change is having on their populations. Let’s have a look at the
evidence:
Bahamas:
Nassau, The Bahamas – The 2010
national statistics recorded that the population growth increased to 353,658
persons in The Bahamas. The population change figure increased by 50,047
persons during the last 10 years.
St Lucia:
The island-nation of Saint
Lucia recorded an overall household population increase of 5 percent from May
2001 to May 2010 based on estimates derived from a complete enumeration of the
population of Saint Lucia during the conduct of the recently completed 2010
Population and Housing Census.
Seychelles:
Population 2002, 81755
Population 2010, 88311
Solomon Islands:
The latest Solomon Islands
population has surpassed half a million – that’s according to the latest census
results.
It’s been a decade since the
last census report, and in that time the population has leaped 100-thousand.
Meanwhile, far from being
places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest
growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and
Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being
likely sources of climate refugees.
Similarly, many of the fastest
growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas
identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees.
More censuses are due to come
in this year, and we await the results for Bangladesh and the Maldives -said to
be places most at risk -with interest.
However, a very cursory look
at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the
UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people,
they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.”
(emphasis added)
Oops! After that monumental
blunder, you would normally expect the UN to do something along the lines of
publishing a press release that could be saying something like: “We hereby
concede that we were completely wrong about 'climate refugees'. We apologize
for having unnecessarily contributed to the hysteria and panic over climate
change”.
So what did the UN do?
It simply 'disappeared' the
site containing its 2005 claims – when clicking on the link, browsers suddenly
displayed a '404' error message instead. Then it dispatched one of its
employees to comment on Gavin Atkins' article as follows:
This seemed to be a legit
post, because we know that a Nick Nuttall of UNEP was quoted on the topic in a
2008 Sunday Times article on 'climate refugees', which has incidentally since
then also been disappeared down the internet's memory hole.
Unfortunately for the UN there
is something called a 'Google cache', and so all the evidence
has been preserved. You can look at all of it here: 'Disappeared sites and articles referring 'UN Climate
Refugees' claims'.
Actually, the 50 million
number was the low end of UNEP's hysterical prediction range
as it turns out. Here is a pertinent quote from a Spiegel article on the topic:
“In October 2005, UNU said:
"Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as
50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration,
United Nations University experts say the international community urgently
needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of
'refugee.'"
It added that "such
problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced
flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could
eventually displace hundreds of millions."
In 2008, Srgjan Kerim,
president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there
would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A
UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced
by the ravages of global warming.”
(emphasis added)
So the forecast was actually
for 50 to 200 million 'climate refugees'. No-one should be surprised that
almost the exact opposite happened. Not a single one of the alarmist
predictions made since 1980 has come true thus far.
This is because the AGW theory
is not an undisputed scientific theory as is widely claimed. Similar to various
scarcity stories, it serves mainly to keep the population alarmed and weaken
its opposition to the imposition of onerous new regulations and taxes. Anyone
looking at this dispassionately must by now come to the conclusion that it is
essentially a giant scam.
And just in case you are
wondering whether the UN has given up on making predictions about climate
refugees – far from it! As 'Der Spiegel' also reported at the time:
“Meanwhile a new forecast is
doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an
environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned
of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN
projection she said — for 2020.”
(emphasis added)
Well, guess what…the first of
these 50 million climate refugees has just appeared on the scene!
Disappearing
Islands?
Ever since they were told that
their islands would be 'flooded' by rising sea levels due to the ice melting at
the poles as a result of anthropogenic global warming, the inhabitants of small
islands in the Pacific have tried to make money from those predictions. Who
wouldn't? Given the sheer size of the AGW gravy train in the West, even a few
crumbs falling from the table would make the islanders quite well off.
In this context, there was
e.g. the famous underwater press conference by the government of the Maldives,
together with a bunch of professional alarmists . Below is a picture of the
event – you can see the Maldives' minister of agriculture in the foreground.
The picture might as well be captioned 'give us more money'!
 |
| Global warming hysterics Maldives style. |
(Photo via ocregister.com, author unknown)
Unfortunately for this
cunning plan to extract funds, most of the Pacific islands that were supposed
to sink beneath the waves have actually seen their surface area growing
instead of shrinking. It turns out this was another one of those
predictions where the exact opposite
of what was forecast is actually happening:
“An Auckland University
researcher has offered new hope to the myriad small island nations in the
Pacific which have loudly complained their low-lying atolls will drown as
global warming boosts sea levels.
Geographer Associate Professor
Paul Kench has measured 27 islands where local sea levels have risen 120mm – an
average of 2mm a year – over the past 60 years, and found that just four had
diminished in size.
Working with Arthur Webb at
the Fiji-based South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission, Kench used
historical aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite images to study
changes in the land area of the islands. They found that the
remaining 23 had either stayed the same or grown bigger, according to the
research published in a scientific journal, Global and Planetary Change.
"It has been thought that
as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown," Prof Kench
told the New Scientist. "But they won't. The sea level will go up and the
island will start responding.”
One of the highest profile
islands – in a political sense – was Tuvalu, where politicians and climate
change campaigners have repeatedly predicted it will be drowned by rising seas,
as its highest point is 4.5 metres above sea level. But the researchers found
seven islands had spread by more than 3 percent on average since the
1950s. One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares or nearly 30
percent of its previous area.
And the research showed
similar trends in the Republic of Kiribati, where the three main urbanised
islands also "grew" – Betio by 30 percent (36ha), Bairiki by 16.3
percent (5.8ha) and Nanikai by 12.5 percent (0.8ha).
Webb, an expert on coastal
processes, told the New Scientist the trend was explained by the fact the
islands mostly comprised coral debris eroded from encircling reefs and pushed
up onto the islands by winds and waves. The process was continuous, because the
corals were alive, he said. In effect the islands respond to changes in weather
patterns and climate – Cyclone Bebe deposited 140ha of sediment on the eastern
reef of Tuvalu in 1972, increasing the main island's area by 10 percent.
But the two men warned that
while the islands were coping for now, any acceleration in the rate of sea
level rise could re-instate the earlier gloomy predictions.”
(emphasis added)
Well, there's at least that:
even after evidence has obliterated yet another climate related scare story, we
are reassured that the 'earlier gloomy predictions could be reinstated'!
Ya think?
Meanwhile, the 'sinking
beneath the waves' Maldives are busy building 11 new airports and are furiously
developing 'luxury beachfront
property'. Shouldn't they be making population relocation arrangements instead?
Just asking!
There is more bad news for
those hoping the islands will soon drown – the sea level just isn't rising all
that much. Unfortunately for the Church of AGW, this was discovered by two
'committed warmists':
“The trouble for all these
Polynesian prophesies of impending doom is that there is no evidence of
appreciable sea-level rise in the past 50 years, not at Tuvalu or anywhere. The more likely causes
of the nation’s ecological threats are over-population, a reduction (deliberate
or otherwise) of natural barrier reefs and government mismanagement of water
resources.
Two American experts on
coastal construction and sea-level — James Houston, director emeritus of
engineering research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and
Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the
University of Florida — examined decades worth of data from all the tidal
monitors around the U.S. and determined earlier this year that “worldwide-temperature
increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100
years.” indeed, the rate at which oceans have been rising has “possibly
decelerated for at least the last 80 years.”
Houston and Dean are committed
warmists. They started their study with the expectation that their results
would show rapidly increasing sea levels. Instead, they found that
the oceans around the U.S. had risen little in the 20th Century and that the
far from rising faster due to global warming were actually rising more slowly. If
the trend of the past 80 years continued, the pair estimated that at most
worldwide oceans would rise by 15 cms (ankle depth) by 2100, rather than the
one to two metres most recently projected by the UN, or the 10 metres estimated
by Al Gore.
Swedish geologist and
physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of INQUA, the International
Commission on Sea Level Change, has studied real-world sea levels for nearly 40
years. Rather than relying mostly on computer models, as most
climate scientists do, Dr. Morner has concentrated on using satellites,
photographs and detailed measurement records to determine whether the oceans
are rising, falling or remaining pretty much the same.
“The sea is not rising,” he
has told anyone who will listen. ”It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” What’s more, if
it rises in the 21st Century, it will be by ”not more than 10cm (four inches),
with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm.” That’s pretty much the same
prediction as that derived by the other real-world measurers, Houston and
Dean.”
You would think that the
reinstatement of 'earlier gloomy predictions' could be
significantly hampered by this rather important discovery. You'd be surprised.
The predictions haven't merely been 'reinstated' – they never went away!
We have highlighted Kiribati
further above, because the first of the 50 million climate refugees is hailing
from there. Kiribati has also frequently been in the news as an alleged
'climate change victim' (in spite of the fact that it is growing, not
shrinking…). In fact, as Willis Eschenbach
explains here, so-called 'floating islands' on coral reefs wouldn't even sink if the sea
level did rise appreciably over the next century (i.e.,more
than just 'ankle deep, plus minus an ankle depth').
Gimme!
Unperturbed by such evidence,
Pacific islanders continue to attempt to cash in on the global warming scare
(we can understand that. It is one of the biggest wealth extraction schemes in
history after all, and therefore hard to resist). In the particular case
presented below it is probably about moving from an economically less
advantageous area to one that is economically more advantageous – and
offers a bountiful welfare state to boot. Admittedly, we are simply guessing at
the motive here, as you can see further below it may have to do with other
personal reasons.
“A man from the small Pacific
island of Kiribati is launching a novel attempt to claim refugee status in New
Zealand based on the threat that climate change poses to his home island. Ioane Teitiota made his
appeal to a New Zealand court on Wednesday that rising sea levels made his
homeland unsafe to live in, France 24 reports.
Teitiota’s first attempt to
receive climate change refugee status was refused by New Zealand immigration
authorities on the grounds that it didn’t meet the legal criteria, namely the
fear of persecution or threats to his life at home. Teitiota came to New Zealand
in 2007 and has a family there, but his visa to stay has expired, according to
his lawyer.
As part of his appeal,
Teitiota outlined how the island of Kiribati, which is made up of some 30 ring
shaped coral reefs only a few feet above sea level, was under distress as “high
tides breached seawalls and rising ocean levels were contaminating drinking
water, killing crops and flooding homes,” according to France 24.
In 2009, a report by the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees found that “sinking island states,”
like Kiribati, “present one of the most dramatic scenarios of the impact of
climate change.” An impact that may threaten the existence of these states
creating a situation where “entire populations of affected states could thus
become stateless,” according to the report.
According to France 24,
Kiribati has an audacious backup plan, as its government “has raised the
prospect of relocating the entire population or building man-made islands to
re-house them if predictions the sea will rise by one metre (3.25 feet) by the
end of the century prove accurate.”
(emphasis added)
You will notice dear reader
that the article omits a number of crucial facts, such as the history of failed
UN predictions about genuine 'climate refugees' and the attempt to cover this
failure up, the data on islands in the Pacific, specifically Kiribati, which
show that these islands are growing instead of shrinking, and lastly the
evidence that concerns about rising sea levels have been blown all out of
proportion by the alarmist faction and that the associated predictions are not
supported by the evidence.
Evidently Mr. Teitiota simply
wants to remain with his family in New Zealand – unfortunately the precise
circumstances are not explained in more detail (for instance, it is unclear why their visas
are not running out, while his is). Whether he has economic reasons for wanting
to move is something we can in fact not be certain about given the paucity of
information, but one thing seems clear: his reasons have absolutely nothing to
do with 'Kiribati sinking beneath the waves', for the simple reason that the
Kiribati atoll is doing the exact opposite. If you own beachfront property at
one of the Kiribati islands, it is currently in the process of naturally
growing at no cost to you.
Perhaps though something good
will come of this story. The court in New Zealand may be forced to look at the
evidence. Its eventual ruling could then take a bit more wind out of alarmist
sails (one can always hope …).
The UN's
original 'climate refugees' map which was 'disappeared' when the population in
the areas concerned turned out to be growing strongly instead of shrinking –
map by UNEP, which disputes both its existence and origin.
Addendum:
Australia About to Repeal Harmful Climate Legislation
After the previous socialist
government decided it was a good time to add one more to the own goals with
which it has imperiled Australia's economy (the other major one was the 'mining
windfall tax', a giant boondoggle which we discussed in detail in “Australia -Effects
of the New Mining Tax” and “Australia's Super Profits Tax”), the new government is
eager to repeal it.
We are referring to the crazed
'carbon tax' the Socialists introduced under the pretext of 'saving the
planet'. Legislation to rescind the measure is being prepared, while Tony
Abbott is urging the socialist opposition to 'repent'. Unfortunately there is
also a plan to leave the offsetting goodies the Gillard government has
installed in place, so the end result will still be more State:
“Tony Abbott is ramping up the
pressure on the Labor Party, releasing draft laws to axe the carbon tax with a
warning to the Opposition to "repent" of its support for the measure.
An exposure draft of the
legislation to repeal Labor's carbon pricing scheme has been released on the
Environment Department's website. Mr Abbott says the bill will be the first
considered by the new Parliament, as promised before the election.
"It is a bill designed to
not only keep the Government's commitments, but to do the right thing by the
people of Australia," the Prime Minister told a Canberra press conference
on Tuesday. The Government says abolishing the scheme will save households $550
a year, including through lower electricity and gas bills.
The compensation measures
brought in by the Gillard government, such as increased pension and family
payments, will also remain in place.”
(emphasis added)
The reason why Abbott is
pressuring the socialist on the matter is that he doesn't yet have the
necessary majority in the Senate to push it through with the votes of his own
party. The Socialists and Greens who have the decisive votes are trying to keep
the law in place. Abbott is pushing them around a bit not because he expects
them to vote in favor, but because he knows their intransigence is likely to
harm them politically. They are obediently falling into the trap:
“If the Labor Party persists
in saying, 'Yes, we support the carbon tax', they will effectively be saying
'No' to the people of Australia," Mr Abbott said. "The people of
Australia understandably want lower cost of living, and they want more secure
jobs. This bill gives them both.
"That's why the pressure
on the Labor Party in the end not to oppose this bill I believe will be
irresistible. "We are giving the Labor Party a chance to repent of its
massive breach of faith with the Australian people in the last
Parliament," he added. "I think that the Labor Party, being
pragmatic, political survivors, will ultimately embrace that opportunity."
[...]
In his first press conference
as Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten said he would fight to maintain Labor's
scheme.
The Greens, who will hold the
balance of power in the Senate until July next year, have also said they will
not support any moves to repeal the carbon tax.
"The Greens will stand
steadfast to protect the Australian people from the climate change criminality
of Tony Abbott," deputy Greens leader Adam Bandt said.”
(emphasis added)
Being called a 'climate
criminal' by the authoritarian 'green on the outside, red on the inside' Greens
is almost a badge of honor. Unfortunately Mr. Abbott is still swallowing the
official alarmist line overall, as he remains 'committed to reducing greenhouse
gas emissions to 5%' and citing the latest IPCC findings. It would be more
refreshing if he were a genuine 'climate criminal' attacking the AGW religion
on a broad front. Oh well, as we always say, let's give it time. In about ten
to fifteen years, the next 'global cooling' hysteria is likely to begin.
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