Islands of Vulnerability

Americans just aren't scared enough by global warming to get serious. At least that seems to be the take-home message from the polls, what with the prospective Savior-in-Chief down by 19 percent by the Washington Post's latest tally. And if we don't care enough to pass the Kyoto Protocol, no one else will comply, anyway.

Folks at the United Nations understand this. They also understand the basic American sense of fair play and compassion, as evinced by our sending troops to Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Ersatz-Yugoslavia and maybe Dili. And they know that if some nation presents as getting the short end of the stick, U.S. largesse is not far behind.

As a result, on Sept. 27 and 28 the U.N. is hosting a special conference of "Island States" that view themselves as particularly threatened by global warming in general and sea-level rise in particular.

"In the low-lying areas, the sea has claimed our burial grounds," said Tuiloma Neroni Slade, Samoa's envoy to the U.N. and the chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), an official hectoring organization whose purpose is to profit from American guilt. Slade added that in the Maldives, in the central Indian Ocean, "Climate change is already taking effect in terms of some of the life support systems."

We'll bet Slade is banking on the hypothesis that Americans will be too guilt-ridden to check the facts, and that we will ratify the Kyoto Protocol pronto in order to make up for our sins. But, here at WCR we just can't seem to fit our tail between our legs.

We consulted the 1995 report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to guesstimate how much sea level has risen in Samoa and the Maldives. The nearest spot to Samoa that maintains a high quality record (Sydney) shows a truly tiny rise of 3.14 inches in the last 100 years, with most of that occurring suddenly around 1940. The rise in the last half of this century, which they said is "already" affecting things, is about 0.4 inch. Figure 1 illustrates this shocker! The IPCC also gives another location that is pretty close to the Maldives, namely Bombay. Sea level there has fallen about one inch since 1950!

Figure 1.  Sea level history in Sydney and Bombay, the nearest records to the Marshall Islands and the Maldives.  Note the fall in sea level at Bombay in the last 50 years.

A 1996 seminar presented at Auckland University in New Zealand by WCR Chief Editor Patrick Michaels demonstrated that forecasts of global warming were liable to be overestimates and the usual iron-plated argument that greenhouse changes tend to congregate in cold air, and can't be found in most of the troposphere, and so forth.

From the audience, the head of Greenpeace, New Zealand, admitted the argument about warming was strong, but raised a question: Given that sea level would rise despite lowered warming, "what," she asked, "would you tell the King of the Marshall Islands?"

United Nations projections for sea-level rise in the next 100 years average 19.3 inches in one scenario and 10.6 in another they call "equally plausible." But these are based upon projected global warming of 2.0°C. WCR readers (Vol. 4, No. 22) know that, based upon observed surface temperatures in the last three decades, and the assumption that the climate modelers at least have the mathematical form of warming correct (a straight line), the expected value is closer to 1.4°C or so. This scales down prospective sea-level rise to 13.5 inches or an "equally plausible" 7.4 inches. So here's what we say to the King: