IÂ must offer a mea culpa to our readers for getting caught by this fish story. I did find the lead on a site I (used to) trust on such things, but that does not excuse my not doing due diligence to verify the item. In light of my error, I would rather eat crow than have you guys think we don’t care about the truth of the items we post here.
Here’s the original story:
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
It turns out the islands are sinking for reasons other than global warming.
For the record, I do not believe that recent activity by man is the primary factor behind global warming, although I don’t see a problem with pollution reduction for any reason. My concern is that regardless of cause, there are some who have it in their best interest to deny any changes are taking place.
However, my concerns should not be the only motivation behind posting a story here. I was taken in and wound up presenting bad information as fact. Again, I apologize and promise to be more careful in the future.
Global trends carry a lot of momentum. In the short haul it would just be arrogance to assume humans could stop current trends. Precautions taken today could have an effect in decades or centuries. As a specie we are defined by out ability to adapt to environmental change. Sometimes that adaptation is just getting the hell out of the way.
Sadly, the arrogance is led by the ignorant and careless. US political “leaders” should have been in the forefront of those working to build a substantial response to this question.
Instead, short-term corporate interests, anti-science pundits, political buffoons dominated the last decade and more of wasted time. Counter-productive sophistry has been the order of the day from the most powerful nation on this planet.
Allowing a big oil man into the most-powerful position in the world for 8 years has killed us all. 8 years of inaction was too much. And now we say we are arrogant in thinking we can reverse these trends. Arrogance led us down this path and Stupidity will keep us there.
(3) Wow, one human being can do all of this in only 8 years… amazing! Sounds like the next Democrat should be able to turn it all around in half the time then… “Hillary Saved Mankind”
Two things.
1. Is this man made, or just a cycle of the Earth.
2. Even if the U.S. did curb greenhouse emissions, it would be naive to think China, India or other 3rd world countries would do the same. Hell, we can’t even keep them from cutting down the rain forest. I guess its easy to bash Bush, big business, the boogy man and anybody else to the right of Al Gore, but the reality is we are only one country and we can’t do it alone.
Oh yeah, the Dems are in charge of Congress now, lets see what kind of solutions they have. I suspect it will be status quo.
Since when Global Warming must be debated as a political issue?
This is the sort of mixup in the priorities that will get us screwed….
Hmm.. maybe they can move here
J/P=?
I call bull crap on this story.
Don’t get me wrong. Global warming is a fact and the consequences will truly be serious. At this moment however, it isn’t the cause of islands disappearing.
When several islands in close proximity get washed away, look for the sea floor to be subsiding. The biggest evidence is that the barrier islands off the Carolinas, as well as any other low lying coral or sand island, would also have washed away. Low lying coastal areas including tidal swamps would have transformed into bays. They haven’t been.
The earth’s surface is rising and falling all the time. These islands must be sitting on a subsiding plate.
Bad science will do more harm convincing people of the danger to global warming then the know nothing nay sayers.
Do a google search on these islands. You will find that the first island in that chain dissappeared did so 50 years ago. This is nothing new. This is not global warming, this is erosion and subsidence.
Global Warming may very well be happening. Global Warming (TM) most certainly is NOT.
Anyway, even if we could do something about it, if the solution meant a reduction in standard of living and quality of life (such as smaller cars, less freeways and reduction of urban sprawl, smaller houses) the price would be to high. If you remove the things worth living for, what’s the point of living?
As a couple other commenters have noted, there’s not enough information in the news report to know exactly what happened. Clearly the sea level is rising due to something. The chart at Wikipedia shows sea level has risen 2 inches in the last 20 years. If the islands were inhabited 20 years ago, a 2 inch rise in sea level probably did not cause the islands to disappear. The process of disappearance probably would have happened by now due to other factors even if the sea level were static. (E.g., witness the continual sinking of New Orleans.)
Certainly the world’s average temperature is rising, and it may be partly due to man’s activities (cattle raising is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases!) But as having talked at length with quite a few of the top climate modelers in the past when I was a research scientist at the National Labs, there’s still a lot of unknowns in the climate models and the data that goes into them. And factors which may actually cause global cooling (such as increased cloudiness and atmospheric aerosols due to a rise in temperature) which counteract the rise in temperature, are still poorly understood.
Should we address the burning of fossil fuels for energy use and replace them with solar and other renewables? Yes, and for reasons that are more wholistic and not driven by a single emotional issue like “global warming” (my background is renewable energy technologies for those who’d like to know). But this cacophony of “global warming” is getting so shrill and illogical that it’s even leading some to call for people like me, who are saying ‘wait a minute”, to be tried and convicted of crimes against humanity! Reminds me of the 50’s Communist scare where there was a Communist under every rock…
Nicely put, Jon! My argument has never been against more efficient engines and alternative energy sources. I just have a hard time with those who tell me to throw away everything worthwhile and huddle in a cave until we have them.
At the moment, Global Warming (TM) is just another goofy religion.
Well there will be plenty of room in the ant-arctic for them soon. 🙂
These islands are in the author Kim Stanley Robinson’s newest trilogy. He’s a sci-fi writer, but brings up some interesting ideas on global warming and science. (Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below)
I keep seeing subjects he covers in his fiction in the headlines of this blog!
Why would we do anything to stop the Earth’s natural rate of change?
You must not love the environment if you don’t want to allow it to change.
That’s not very liberal of you.
Why are we under the impression that the earth shouldn’t change? Hasn’t history written of the seas rising in the past? Then again, we keep rewriting history books so maybe it was politically incorrect for some species of fish for the water temp to rise or fall or swell or……………………………
We don’t need proof of global warming, we just need to recognize it for what it is. Global warming is the next obvious step on our planet. The planets changes naturally all the time, we just don’t live long enough to see it. Global warming will melt some ice, raising the water level and drowning out some places. It will also free up the land in the north and make northern Canada more temperate.
Glancing through the naysayers and know-nothings assembled, here, however — I’m reminded once again that being a geek doesn’t make one especially conscious of science or the scientific method.
The sum of most of the negative content is — I don’t believe it — with the emphasis on “I”. Egregious solypsism.
You want to find out if global warming is man made or not only fund one more study and end funding on the study of global warming and I think you might actually get a true answer, but as long as there is more funding to “study” the problem there will never be an answer because even scientists are greedy and willing to study the “problem” adnausium as long as we keep paying them to study it
kinda like peace negotiators (you ever negotiate a true peace then your out of a job ) think about it, and look at how many there are and how little gets done
Global warming is caused by all the hot air from the politicians around the globe.
It turns out the islands are sinking for reasons other than global warming.
I think you will find this is the case with just about every other event some are trying to blame on global warming. Just another case of “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”.
23,
What do you think of this?
A vast ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has broken up, a further sign of the astonishing rate at which polar ice is now melting because of global warming. “
I saw this article a few days ago as well….but someone told me it needed researched and when I did, bang….I found out this was a bogus story.
One of the things I found Mr. Fusion, is just what you said, it seems that one of the reasons these islands in that area are being inched away by the ocean is the fact they are on the edge of a tectonic plate that is sliding under the next plate, causing the ocean side of the islands to lower, thus allowing more and more of them to be worn away.
We tend to forget in the rush for climate change funding that the oceans have risen and fallen many, many times in the Earths history. Most islands weren’t even above water 100,000 years ago, and won’t be again in the next 10,000 years or less. This is a living planet, it changes daily, and seems to follow cycles. When the North pole is ice free more than frozen, then some other area will be under water or less habitable…..thats just the way it is. Mankind are pigs….we have trashed this planet from day 1….but I don’t feel we can actually stop the changes that are happening, anymore than we can put a sunshade on the sun. Slow them down???….maybe, but not all that much. Look at any land mass on the planet and ask a geologist how many times it’s been under water or under sand or under volcanic ash and you will be amazed by what he tells you.
Unlike the Dinosaurs, we have the ability to adapt ourselves or our culture to survive the changes and probably in 1000 years, be right back polluting the crap out of the water, air and oceans.
Ha, ha. [comment edited]
What I want to know is when global warning is going to hit Seattle – its freakin freezing up here
MOSt dont think about it,
But the warming places more water in the air.
That AIR, then clouds the sun, which can lower the temp.
whats happens more then anything is a Wider range of weather conditions.
In summer on HOT days you may get MORE warmer days, and in the winter, it MAY get colder, but most of all, you WILL get wetter, being on the coast and abit North.
Kudos to you for trying to get the facts straight.
Now if you guys will keep it up, you’ll realize that the Kyoto Treaty does very little to change temperatures, while affecting people’s lives very much.
You know, you liberals aren’t doing a very good job on this one.
Just because the story is bullshit doesn’t mean it can’t be used to forward the anti-business, anti-worker initiatives that “try to help”.
Really, if humans stop trying to change the environment, how will we solve all of these problems?
#32,
Really, if humans stop trying to change the environment, how will we solve all of these problems?
Comment by James Hill — 12/30/2006 @ 7:19 am
I believe most of us want to stop our harmful behavior more then a blanket stop to everything. There is a difference between building a comfortable, energy efficient building to live in and a monster box department store with several acres paved over. If you can’t tell the difference, you are even “less enlightened” then even I could give you credit for.
I saw Al Gore’s movie and found it quite interesting, all that supposedly incontrovertable data he presented seemed to point to very troubling changes sometime in the future; also, Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” (really intriguing), examining past societal disasters in detail, pointing out parallels in the modern world. What to actually do about it, though, seems to be a hard nut for those guys to come to grips with. I agree that everyone should probably try to adopt an attitude of “whether we did it or not, we may have to learn how to deal with it anyway”. And don’t listen to the Reaganites and pathologically smiling corporations as they try to fool us all into a false sense of security etc.
But predicting the future at length for a place as huge and chaotic as the Earth (and its inhabitants) has always been something of a crapshoot, even with sophisticated computer models, especially when some other factor or condition appears that was not anticipated or noticed. It’s awfully hard to get large numbers of people to pull together on such far reaching crises, when for example we keep seeing things like the predicted Great Hurricane Season of 2006 turn into a ‘never mind’ fizzle (I remember being warned about it last spring. Now they say it was stopped by El Nino. Huh? Maybe I’m out of it, but I thought I heard once that that was a (somewhat) known cyclic phenomenon).
Thanks guys. You really have a magnificent crystal ball there.
One thing that I find hard to listen to about these dire warnings is that some of them say the damage is already done, and you may as well get out a parka or snorkel (take your pick), and prepare for rock n’ roll climate strife no matter what you do, and perhaps only a truly profound cutback of resource consumption (or even a great dying) will reverse it, and only then sometime in the far future. So why bother?
(Looking for someone to blame? I shake my fist at my deceased grandfather, who blithely drove around in his huge tail-finned 50’s Cadillac without a care in the world. Naughty naughty human beings!!)
What…me worry?