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Rising Seas Not Resulting in Disappearing Islands

Published

4 months ago

5 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

A spate of recent articles acknowledges a fact that Climate Realism has long discussed. Most island nations, rather than sinking beneath the waves as seas rise amid modest warming, as predicted by climate alarmists and island profiteers, are, in fact growing.

Writing for The Pipeline, Buck Throckmorton thoroughly debunks claims that recent collapses of houses built on the shores of barrier islands in North Carolina were caused by climate change:

[B]arrier islands … are impermanent deposits of sand, which reshape, move, merge, appear, and disappear due to tides, winds, and storms.

The movement of barrier islands is not due to rising sea levels, it is due to a naturally occurring force called “longshore drift.” Where there are man-made efforts to stabilize barrier islands with jetties and sea walls, this produces other impacts on currents that cause erosion in some waterfront areas and new sand deposits in others. Beach houses in the Outer Banks are not being lost due to rising sea levels, they are being lost due to shifting sands.

Throckmorton also pointed to the disappearance of Tucker’s Island, off the coast of New Jersey, which completely disappeared due to “long-shore drift,” not rising seas.

NOAA describes the impact of long-shore drift, thusly:

Longshore drift may also create or destroy entire barrier islands along a shoreline. A barrier island is a long offshore deposit of sand situated parallel to the coast. As longshore drifts deposit, remove, and redeposit sand, barrier islands constantly change.

Semi-permanent, shifting barrier islands are not the only types of islands not being destroyed by climate change-induced rising seas. Even  The New York Times  (NYT) was recently forced by reality to admit that coral atolls, long the poster child of rising seas claiming nations, have been expanding and adding land amidst the Earth’s slight recent warming.

As recently as April 2024, with a story titled “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands,“ the NYT was still pushing the lie that rising seas threaten dozens of island nations, consisting of hundreds of small coral atolls, with extinction. Reality forced the NYT to reverse itself in the space of just three months. The author of a late June article, “A Surprising Climate Find,” wrote:

Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.

The problem with this narrative is that the fact of growing islands during the recent period of climate change is not new news. In fact, as my colleague Linnea Lueken noted in a recent piece, the study the NYT references was published in 2018, six years ago. It found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting.

Indeed, geological understanding of coral atoll growth and demise is not newly discovered.

“Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels,” Lueken points out. “Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.”

Repeated studies show that what is true of the Maldives, growth amid rising seas, is equally true of the islands that make up Tuvalu and Kiribati, and across the island chains of Micronesia. One well-cited study from 2015 reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown, in recent decades.

Oceans, oceans everywhere, and nowhere can be found the much-bemoaned decline in island nations hyped be climate hucksters with regularity. When even the NYT is forced to admit this truth, you know the climate alarm narrative is in trouble.

Sources: The Pipeline;  The New York Times;  Climate Realism

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Economy

Canada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy

Published on October 8, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.

First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.

The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.

On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.

There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.

That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.

The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.

The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.

Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.

In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.

Author:

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
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Economy

Federal government’s environmental policies will do more harm than good

Published on September 25, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.

Through a variety of regulatory and spending initiatives, the Trudeau government is expanding its control over our lives, often in the name of climate change or other environmental objectives. For example, the government plans to force consumers to buy electric vehicles instead of conventional cars and has proposed or implemented plastics restrictions on consumers and businesses—everything from plastic drinking straws and plastic utensils to clothing material and food packages.

However, while evidence of the high costs to consumers continues to mount, evidence of the environmental benefits is notably absent. Indeed, many recent studies provide evidence that Ottawa’s restrictions on consumers may well cause net environmental harm. One reason is that the plastic products the federal government is so intent on restricting are more environmentally efficient than alternatives.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology concludes, “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.” The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.

Why? Because plastic generally takes less energy to manufacture and transport than the alternatives. In fact, many plastic products that are more environmentally friendly than non-plastic alternatives (according to the study) are products the Trudeau government wants to ban or curtail through regulation.

Other evidence shows plastic bans of the type imposed in Canada cause environmental ruin, contrary to the predictions of politicians. For example, research in New Jersey found after single-use plastic bags were banned in 2022, shoppers switched to the heavier reusable bags. “Owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%.”

Similarly, the New York Times reported that while California banned single-use plastic bags almost a decade ago, in 2023 “Californians threw away more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed, according to figures from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.”

Also from the Wall Street Journal, analyses suggest electric vehicles often emit more particulate pollution (dust, dirt and soot) than conventional vehicles. That’s because most particulate pollution these days is not from the tailpipe but from tire wear. EVs are much heavier than conventional vehicles so their tires wear out faster, increasing particulate pollution. The firm Emissions Analytics compared a plug-in electric to a hybrid vehicle and found the plug-in electric, which weighed more, emitted about one-quarter more particulate matter than the hybrid as a result of tire wear.

Last year, the chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noted that EVs manufactured by Ford, Volvo and Toyota were all about 33 per cent heavier than conventionally powered versions of those same vehicles. That’s a problem not only for the environment but also for driver safety—and yet more evidence that the Trudeau government’s EV mandates will harm Canadians.

When it comes to vehicles, plastic products and many other things, the Trudeau government should begin reducing its control over consumers. The harm to consumers is evident; the compensating benefits to the environment—if any—are not.

Author:

Matthew Lau
Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute
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