Thanks Paul. Fascinating and hilarious. The former president, hyping up the existential climate change threat to the islands one moment, being jailed for 13 years for terror charges another. There’s an immoral to this story.
Very interesting indeed – it seems the Maldives has been caught up in the “Belt and Road Initiative”, a truly massive global infrastructure project by the Chinese.
Actual measurements since 1950 reveal the rate to be between 0.8 and 1.6mm per year. But hey, what’s an order of magnitude when you’re the national broadcaster trying to brainwash school kids?
I like the ‘deadpan’ delivery as he sticks with his bafflement about the new investment, housebuilding and new runway, given that the Islands are all going to be underwater in just a few years time. I hadn’t come across him before.
In the early 1990s my wife and I vacationed in the Maldives and while sightseeing by floatplane observed a clear relationship between the presence of islands within atolls and the size of those atolls. Small atolls were full of sediment derived from the encircling atoll reefs with many containing central islands where storms had built the accumulated sediment above sea level. Atolls larger than a given size were never full of sediment, leaving a deeper-water hole and no islands. Clearly the length of those reefs was insufficient, since Holocene flooding, to fill the larger central depression. The implications of these observations were (and still are) profound. The health of islands (the only places where people can live) depends entirely upon the continued supply of new sediment into the atoll from healthy surrounding reefs. Yet the only building materials available on inhabited islands comes from the reefs. If coral rock is harvested from the island encircling reefs, then those reefs would be damaged,
and the continued existence of the islands threatened. Healthy reefs are needed supply
sediment to continue the building up of the islands.
We requested permission from the Maldives authorities to expand our studies, believing we could provide scientific evidence to support a ban on exploiting local reefs for building materials. Instead reefs forming nearby larger atolls that lacked islands could and should be exploited. We received a blank refusal together with a lie that such a study was already being done. It wasn’t. Much later we realized that the reasons for the refusal was that our proposed study was partly based upon the premise that sea-level rise alone was incapable of drowning reefs (and therefore islands would continue to exist). This was anathema to the Maldives government who were intent upon milking the West for recompense for damage caused by CAGW sealevel rise. Furthermore blame would shift from the West to the Maldivians themselves for any damage caused by an inability of local reefs to offset any sea-level rise.
Despite the refusal of the Maldives government to cooperate with us,we continued using detailed aerophotographs from a colleague. But after the death of my wife (23 years ago) I just couldn’t face writing up our results and conclusions, and our study went nowhere.
Every body knows that the seas ain’t rising,*
everybody knows that the Maldives are surviving,
no one says, but everybody knows,
that’s the way that it goes.
AK, thank you for your account, poignant from two very different perspectives. Firstly, there is the tawdry loss of ethics in the great climate scam so encapsulated in the Maldives. Secondly, there is your personal loss; I hope I have not intruded with that observation.
DB5003. Fear not, my wife died nearly a quarter of a century ago. There are only some regrets left. There were many joint studies that remained unfinished. Some I completed but many, like the Maldives work I just couldn’t complete. About that time I focussed more upon my teaching, and as a result became infamous for my misleading undergraduates down the wicked paths of climate change heresy (much to CRU’s discomfort). I often used to wonder what Gill would have made of Climategate and my small role in it.
Climate Scepticism 
Thanks Paul. Fascinating and hilarious. The former president, hyping up the existential climate change threat to the islands one moment, being jailed for 13 years for terror charges another. There’s an immoral to this story.
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Very interesting indeed – it seems the Maldives has been caught up in the “Belt and Road Initiative”, a truly massive global infrastructure project by the Chinese.
Here’s an article which provides a glimpse of the scale of these works going on:
https://www.roadsproject.net/maldives/
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The BBC says sea level is rising in the Maldives at 9mm per year (nearly a cm) and teaches GCSE students this ‘fact’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00xnsmd
Actual measurements since 1950 reveal the rate to be between 0.8 and 1.6mm per year. But hey, what’s an order of magnitude when you’re the national broadcaster trying to brainwash school kids?
https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/republic-of-maldives.html
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Put on automatic subtitles for a laugh…
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I like the ‘deadpan’ delivery as he sticks with his bafflement about the new investment, housebuilding and new runway, given that the Islands are all going to be underwater in just a few years time. I hadn’t come across him before.
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LOL mentions 2015 islands growing and new Scientist
missed this from 2010; (also New Scientist)
BBC Low-lying Pacific islands ‘growing not sinking’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47553174
A new geological study has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.
The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.
One of the authors of the study, featured in the magazine the New Scientist, predicts that the islands will still be there in 100 years’ time.
However he says it is not clear whether many of them will be inhabitable.
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Score so far: 0 out of 1196 Maldive islands has sunk.
Yet another climate alarm fail. How many more do there have to be before everyone catches on?
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Outstanding.
Thank you.
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Hunterson, nothing to do with me or any of us. Thank the academic agent guy! See his youtube channel, or @notcarking on twitter.
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In the early 1990s my wife and I vacationed in the Maldives and while sightseeing by floatplane observed a clear relationship between the presence of islands within atolls and the size of those atolls. Small atolls were full of sediment derived from the encircling atoll reefs with many containing central islands where storms had built the accumulated sediment above sea level. Atolls larger than a given size were never full of sediment, leaving a deeper-water hole and no islands. Clearly the length of those reefs was insufficient, since Holocene flooding, to fill the larger central depression. The implications of these observations were (and still are) profound. The health of islands (the only places where people can live) depends entirely upon the continued supply of new sediment into the atoll from healthy surrounding reefs. Yet the only building materials available on inhabited islands comes from the reefs. If coral rock is harvested from the island encircling reefs, then those reefs would be damaged,
and the continued existence of the islands threatened. Healthy reefs are needed supply
sediment to continue the building up of the islands.
We requested permission from the Maldives authorities to expand our studies, believing we could provide scientific evidence to support a ban on exploiting local reefs for building materials. Instead reefs forming nearby larger atolls that lacked islands could and should be exploited. We received a blank refusal together with a lie that such a study was already being done. It wasn’t. Much later we realized that the reasons for the refusal was that our proposed study was partly based upon the premise that sea-level rise alone was incapable of drowning reefs (and therefore islands would continue to exist). This was anathema to the Maldives government who were intent upon milking the West for recompense for damage caused by CAGW sealevel rise. Furthermore blame would shift from the West to the Maldivians themselves for any damage caused by an inability of local reefs to offset any sea-level rise.
Studies by others were also prevented, sabotaged or were attacked by those pushing the dangerous sea-level rise stories see: I believe the Maldives government has been complicit in this almost Lysenko like treatment of scientific study. See
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinion-and-calls-to-action-the-maldives-is-not-being-overrun-by-sea-level-rise/
The pulling up and destruction of a famous mangrove tree that demonstrated the absence of any sealevel rise over decades, was probably “science” at its worst.
Despite the refusal of the Maldives government to cooperate with us,we continued using detailed aerophotographs from a colleague. But after the death of my wife (23 years ago) I just couldn’t face writing up our results and conclusions, and our study went nowhere.
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Every body knows that the seas ain’t rising,*
everybody knows that the Maldives are surviving,
no one says, but everybody knows,
that’s the way that it goes.
Willis E on Floating Islands.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
Rate of change remains less than 2mm per year
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AK, thank you for your account, poignant from two very different perspectives. Firstly, there is the tawdry loss of ethics in the great climate scam so encapsulated in the Maldives. Secondly, there is your personal loss; I hope I have not intruded with that observation.
LikeLike
DB5003. Fear not, my wife died nearly a quarter of a century ago. There are only some regrets left. There were many joint studies that remained unfinished. Some I completed but many, like the Maldives work I just couldn’t complete. About that time I focussed more upon my teaching, and as a result became infamous for my misleading undergraduates down the wicked paths of climate change heresy (much to CRU’s discomfort). I often used to wonder what Gill would have made of Climategate and my small role in it.
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