You can almost smell the disappointment and hear the grinding teeth. The New York Times sent “climate reporter” Raymond Zhong and photographer Jason Gulley to the Maldives to document how rapidly they were vanishing due to rising sea levels. Because, you know, climate change.
The only problem was they soon found out, to their shock, what the rest of us with functioning critical faculties knew perfectly well.
The very obvious fact that the low-lying Maldives haven’t vanished.
No doubt the editors of the Times were as shocked as their remaining readers. I mean, everybody knows low-lying islands have been wiped out by climate change. There are billions of climate refugees! The UN said so!
Big surprise: the UN is about as accurate in its confident predictions as John Edwards doing a cold reading on Paul Ehrlich.
When we investigate this iron logic of low-lying islands and an endlessly rising sea level, we discover that, actually, most of these islands are rising rather than shrinking – especially if they’re inhabited by significant populations. Humans don’t go gentle into that good night, and neither, it seems, do the coral reefs and atolls on which the Maldives and countless other island nations around the world sit.
The creative, creating, and inventive humans who call these islands home are pretty reluctant to let the ocean waves slowly drag their shores under. When humans act faster than microscopic, gradual shifts in the climate, outcomes from a harsher nature don’t mean certain death.
This is one of the great fallacies of the Climate Cult – and the most damaging. The idea that humans will simply sit idly by while the world changes around them is not only an insult that ignores the entirety of human history, but it leads to disaster far faster than miniscule climate drifts. Because the Climate Cult have gone all King Canute, pouring all their energies and trillions of dollars into trying to stop the climate changing. If only a fraction of this money and effort was put into simply adapting to what is in fact perfectly normal on a dynamic planet, we’d be better off all round.
The humans of the Maldives are no less industrious and ingenious as most other humans, so they did what humans do best and what has made us the most successful species on the planet: adapt.
Thanks to land reclamation, 93.5 per cent of inhabited Maldivian islands expanded between 2004–2006 and 2014–2016, some 60 per cent of which through human engineering efforts. While the journalists and doomsday-peddlers half a world away were worrying over the disappearing islands, the Maldivians were busy building a new capital city in Hulhumale. During 20 years of sea level rises, they turned a strip of land barely usable as an airport into a full-fledged city with high-rises, harbors, and city centers.
But it wasn’t just humans adapting. The Earth itself is a dynamic system. It, too, adapts and responds. For instance, Bangladesh is one of the lowest-lying countries on Earth. Naturally, it was an early poster child for Rising Sea Level Doom! Except that Bangladesh actually grew in area. Mostly thanks to increased sedimentation in the vast Irrawaddy Delta.
Comparing aerial photos of the Maldivian islands from mid-century until the early 2000s, it turned out that “the seas had risen an inch or so each decade, yet the waves had kept piling sediment on the islands’ shores, enough to mean that most of them hadn’t changed much in size.” Clearly, the mechanic story of oceans up, islands down was flawed.
But the stars of the Maldives story are the ever-underestimated humans.
In addition to those natural and dynamic geological processes, we have the Dutch story of humans taking fate into their own hands. The sea encroaching on your homes? Let’s shut it out, drain the swamps, make dykes and polders, and make the reclaimed land livable. Something like a third of the [Netherlands], including the city of Amsterdam, is below mean sea level.
Humans, it turns out, don’t stand around haplessly waiting for a slowly eroding shoreline to make them homeless – be they rich nations like the Netherlands or poor, developing ones like the Maldives.
As it happens, Climate Cultists are as adaptable as any other humans, in their own, monomaniac, way. Bangladesh isn’t vanishing? Fine, go to the Maldives. Oh, wait, the Maldives aren’t vanishing, either.
Gaiadammit, there must be some story of Rising Sea Level Doom! they can pin their hairshirts on?
Wait! Stop the presses! The first species wiped out by rising sea levels has arrived to save the Cultists’ day!
The Key Largo cactus has vanished! Obliterated from the US mainland by Rising Sea Level Doom! Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth!
Except…
The Key Largo tree cactus still exists in parts of the Caribbean, including Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas.
Yeah, but apart from all those ones, it’s, like, totally extinct.
