Loudmouth there is one real problem in the Pacific atoll communities, & that is population. Since our entrance to the area with health care, & better imported food supplementing the fish, coconuts & swamp taro, about all an atoll produces, the people are living longer, & breeding more successfully. The huge population growth I could see must be outgrowing the food supply capacity

I recently had a Google earth trip over many of the atolls I have visited & worked on in the past. I was horrified by what I saw. One atoll, Nuguria, about 130 nautical miles north of Bougainville is a prime example.

Even with 52 islands on the reef there is not much land. 35 years ago the entire population of about 225 lived on the home island, about half a mile in diameter, it easily accommodated the village.

Now a large population has moved to the large island, previously only used for the copra plantation, the airfield & the taro plantation. Today there are about as many canoes as there were people 35 years ago, the airstrip is gone, trees appear to have taken over the coconuts, & I couldn't find a taro patch.

They will probably be looking for a new home pretty soon, if not already.

Agnostic,

You assert: " For your argument to be valid all land masses with a coastline would have to be subsiding at a similar rate to account for sea level rise."

Well, no: there are myriads of other factors involved. Some coastlines are always rising slightly - the east coast of Australia for example, Scandinavia, due to the 'bounce-back' from the Ice Age. Some regions are subsiding or rising, depending on the movements of tectonic plates - the Bengal area for example where the tectonic plate is tilting, slowly sinking in the east (around Bangla Desh) and rising in the west (around Bengal in India).

As well, the sea may be encroaching on low-lying areas for man=made reasons other than climate change: for example, the building of the Aswan Dam on the Nile fifty-odd years ago deprived the Delta area of the usual flow of silt from upstream, as far as Ethiopia and Uganda, being deposited in the Delta. Hence the sea encroaches. Extraction of vast quantities of oil in the Gulf of Mexico has caused the nearby coastlines to subside. Reduced river flows due to irrigation schemes would lead to either the encroachment of the sea in estuaries or the blocking of river mouths, such as the Murray. And so on.

Actually, it must be far more difficult to measure actual sea-level rise accurately, in the face of so many confounding forces, and it must be especially misleading to think it can be done by simply measuring 'effects' on coast-lines. And I suppose if only the water would stay still for a while, and tides cease, then satellites could measure changes down to the last milli-millimetre.

I hope you have found this useful.

Joe

Thank you Loudmouth. Quite right. I am aware of these factors and others such as isostatic rebound causing coastlines to rise. As you say, many factors contribute to sea level rise but the most significant and rapid is undoubtedly ice mass loss, particularly from the polar ice caps, primarily due to atmospheric and ocean warming. That rate of loss is more than doubling per decade. It is a serious and continuing problem initiated by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the effect of which can no longer be controlled by human action.

Where do you get this garbage Agnostic?

Arctic ice has expanded rapidly in the last 2 years & is now near the average for the satellite era. Satellite is the only acceptable way of measuring ice volume, as so called climate scientists have proved there is very little they say with any resemblance to the truth.

There has been an increase in Antarctic ice of over a billion square kilometres over the last 10 years, again measured by satellite, so reasonably accurate, being much harder to fudge by corrections.

You need to get out more Agnostic, & stop reading only propaganda, if you want the truth.

To Agnostic.

With only 350 words per post, I tend to concentrate upon the salient points, and often do not have enough word space to respond to all of the points raised by a topic's author.

After ten years of jousting with opponents on debate sites, I am aware that some people use high sounding causes as Trojan Horses to conceal their real agendas. My opinion about Human Induced Global Warming (HIGW), is that it may have a minor basis in fact, but that it is greatly exaggerated. I would like the world to cut down on our fossil fuel emissions, and that is why I support nuclear power generation.

But I think that HIGW is a Trojan Horse primarily supported by evangelists who have an agenda, which they know the public will never accept, unless they can scare the crap out of them. Like claiming that the Earth is going to turn into Venus unless we adopt their ideology. We even had one puritan topic author on OLO angrily claim just that. Some people advocate HIGW because they equate modern living with democratic capitalism, and they want to create socialist multicultural states where everybody does what the "intelligent" educated elites tell them to do. Other geezers want the western world to become one with nature and live our lives of some sort Amish rural poverty existence.

I think that Mike Pope is just another self loathing westerner with a burden of guilt over the fact that his people are prosperous and happy, while most of the people in the world is in real trouble. HIGW is just his means to an end. Mike thinks that the greedy western world must do something to alleviate poverty, by allowing any poor person to just enter their countries. Since that will not go down well with his own people, Mike has to think up a moral reason to justify it. So he supports Human Induced Global Warming. Since HIGW is presmubaly the western world's fault, we therefore, we have a moral obligation to let every third worlder flood into our countries.

Hasbeen – what you are talking about is polar sea ice and what I am talking about (as I have made clear in my comments) is polar land based ice, two quite different things with very different effects on sea level.

Sea ice is merely the solid form of seawater. It seasonally changes form from liquid to solid to liquid but has no significant change on sea level. Arctic sea ice volume has been contracting and is well below the 1979 extent. Antarctic sea ice has been expanding in both volume and area covered. However, neither of these changes significantly effects sea level.

Land based ice is formed from water in the atmosphere falling on land in liquid or solid form (sleet/snow) and being compressed under its own weight. It forms glaciers and ice sheets. When these melt, liquid water flows from them or chunks of ice fall off them into the ocean and this does increase the volume and so the level of seawater.

Glaciers world-wide are in retreat and the liquid water they produce flows to the sea. The Polar Ice Sheets are also loosing ice, resulting in water and ice flowing from the land into the oceans, increasing their volume and level at an accelerating rate. Evidence for this is clear and unequivocal.