Nothing to sea here either

Written by Op Ed Watch on July 19, 2024. Posted in Current News

We often hear that sea levels are rising much faster in some places than others, and the rate in the fast-rising places is proof of climate change, almost as if the world’s oceans were not all connected.

Or that sinking land in some places is irrelevant to the phenomenon. As one sarcastic viewer asked “So apparently ships have to go uphill as they approach cities where the sea is rising so much more rapidly than in other places?”

And another thing. In The Economist piece we cited last week on how “The ‘Venice of Africa’ is sinking into the sea” that publication did concede that:

“The major cities built by European colonial powers a century or more ago are nearly all found on fragile sandy shores, often among lagoons and mangrove estuaries at the mouths of rivers used for transport and trade (see map).

Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos, for instance, straddles a string of islands. Much of Mauritania’s, Nouakchott, is below sea level, protected only by a belt of dunes that may itself be breached by the waves.”

If such places sink into the swamp, give some credit to the swamp, as well as to postcolonial standards of infrastructure maintenance. But none to reporters’ research skills. The piece also says:

“West Africa’s coastal cities may not yet be the most visible victims of rising seas. Several cities in Asia have witnessed more dramatic disasters. Half of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, was submerged under nearly four metres of water in 2007, which forced half a million people from their homes.”

Yeah? Would that be the same Jakarta that, we pointed out four and a half years ago, is actually sinking fast, 3.5 metres in the decade from 1990 to 2000 alone? Or that in our “The Fate of Atlantis?” video we noted is still sinking at 5 mm/year?

That kind of thing can get you submerged, but it’s bad land management that does it, from heavy buildings on improper foundations to excessive groundwater extraction, not the wrath of Gaia or should we say Pontus?

We could say other things too, especially when we read in Scientific American that “Giant Viruses Discovered in Arctic Ice Could Slow Sea-Level Rise”. No they couldn’t. The seas have been rising at essentially the same pace for over 6,000 years, since the end of the big pulse melts earlier in the Holocene as the great ice sheets retreated at the end of the last glaciation.

We’re not knocking scientific ingenuity. We’re just saying that this rigid framework of we’re-all-going-to-die-from-climate-change is distorting research findings as well as priorities. The article says:

“Scientists announced the discovery in a recent paper on the Greenland ice sheet. Some of the viruses, they say, have infected algae, potentially limiting the growth of colored snow blooms that can speed up ice melt and raise global sea levels.”

Eh? Can they? Then why didn’t they? It goes on in this vein:

“The Greenland ice sheet is the largest single contributor to global sea level rise. Algae can darken the surface of the snow, causing it to absorb more sunlight and melt at faster rates. Researchers suspect that the newly discovered viruses help control that algal growth.”

OK. But if so surely they have been for thousands of years so there is, essentially, nothing to see here folks. Except of course that global warming is this runaway tipping point disaster thingy in which the settled unsettled science is unsettled but settled:

“That theory isn’t yet confirmed — and scientists aren’t sure exactly how much algae contributes to melting on the Greenland ice sheet. But algal blooms are growing larger as the planet warms, Perini [one of the lead authors, Laura Perini of Aarhus University in Denmark] said, making it important to investigate the factors that affect their growth.”

Alas, the piece quoted another expert who thought the paper was totally terrific but:

“what it all means for Greenland’s future melt rates remains unclear, he added. That’s because scientists don’t know exactly how much ice algae melts.”

Oh darn. Send more money to the researchers because “From a climate point of view, we need the support of large-scale scalable experiments”. (Didn’t see that ending coming, did you?)

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