Low-lying Kiribati suffers from a range of environmental typical problems that have been linked to climate change being an island 10′ above sea level in the middle of the ocean, including storm surges, flooding and water contamination.
Mr Teitiota moved to New Zealand in 2007 and overstayed his visa, coming to the attention of police in 2011 over a minor traffic violation.
How ironic, he came back before GLOBAL WARMING™!!!111!!1! propaganda even started and I’m betting he never read Al’s book (published in 2006) and he just happened to invade a place where everyone would love to live and yet, in all this time, his 3rd world hellhole is still there. The ocean has “risen” (allegedly) .6″ since he left.
Anthony Watts / May 1, 2012
wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/01/kiribati-a-global-warming-refuge/
From an NSF press release, comes this strange new term, look for real estate prices to soar and airports to be built there soon. Oh, wait, that’s Tuvalu/Maldives, which global warming is supposed to inundate with sea level rise. Never mind. But then there’s this:
In September 2011, Kiribati’s President Anote Tong and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a joint statement:
“[they]….. today stressed that climate change posed the most serious threat to the livelihoods, security and survival of the island nation’s residents and the inhabitants of the wider Pacific region, saying the phenomenon was undermining efforts to achieve sustainable development.”
This NSF press release is going to put a crimp on the handout industry, methinks:
“Ocean Currents May Mitigate Warming Near Handful of Equatorial Islands”
Scientists predict ocean temperatures will rise in the equatorial Pacific by the end of the century, wreaking havoc on coral reef ecosystems.
But a new study shows that climate change could cause ocean currents to operate in a way that mitigates warming near a handful of islands right on the equator.
Those islands include some of the 33 coral atolls that form the nation of Kiribati. This low-lying country is at risk from sea-level rise caused by global warming.
Surprisingly, these Pacific islands within two degrees north and south of the equator may become isolated climate change refuges for corals and fish.
“The finding that there may be refuges in the tropics where local circulation features buffer the trend of rising sea surface temperature has important implications for the survival of coral reef systems,” said David Garrison, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research.
Here’s how it could happen, according to the study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists Kristopher Karnauskas and Anne Cohen, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.
At the equator, trade winds push a surface current from east to west.
About 100 to 200 meters below, a swift countercurrent develops, flowing in the opposite direction.
This, the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC), is cooler and rich in nutrients. When it hits an island, like a rock in a river, water is deflected upward on an island’s western flank.
This upwelling process brings cooler water and nutrients to the sunlit surface, creating localized areas where tiny marine plants and corals flourish.
…
These islands are easy to overlook because they are tiny, remote, and lie at the far left edge of standard global satellite maps that place continents in the center.
Yeah, I totally trust scientists who don’t notice things at the edges of maps!
Karnauskas, a climate scientist, was working with coral scientist Cohen to explore how climate change would affect central equatorial Pacific reefs.
When he changed the map view on his screen in order to view the entire tropical Pacific at once,
Good Scientist!
he saw that chlorophyll concentrations jumped up again exactly at the Gilbert Islands on the equator.
Satellite maps also showed cooler sea surface temperatures on the west sides of these islands, part of Kiribati.
“I’ve been studying the tropical Pacific Ocean for most of my career, and I had never noticed that,”
… an great Science!!
he said. “It jumped out at me immediately, and I thought, ‘there’s probably a story there.’”
So Karnauskas and Cohen began to investigate how the EUC would affect the equatorial islands’ reef ecosystems, starting with global climate models that simulate effects in a warming world.
Global-scale climate models predict that ocean temperatures will rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the central tropical Pacific.
… over no specific time period that this reporter can ascertain . . .
. . . .Even the best global models, with their planet-scale views and lower resolution, cannot predict conditions in areas as small as these small islands, Karnauskas said.
Bears repeating??
Even the best global models, with their planet-scale views and lower resolution, cannot predict conditions in areas as small as these small islands, Karnauskas said.
So the scientists combined global models with a fine-scale regional model to focus on much smaller areas around minuscule islands scattered along the equator.
To accommodate the trillions of calculations needed for such small-area resolution, they used the new high-performance computer cluster at WHOI called “Scylla.”
(Your wallet, of course, being Charybdis)
“Global models predict significant temperature increases in the central tropical Pacific over the next few decades, but in truth conditions can be highly variable across and around a coral reef island,” Cohen said.
“To predict what the coral reef will experience in global climate change, we have to use high-resolution models, not global models.”
The model predicts that as air temperatures rise and equatorial trade winds weaken, the Pacific surface current will also weaken by 15 percent by the end of the century.
The then-weaker surface current will impose less friction and drag on the EUC, so this deeper current will strengthen by 14 percent.
“Our model suggests that the amount of upwelling will actually increase by about 50 percent around these islands and reduce the rate of warming waters around them by about 0.7 C (1.25 F) per century,” Karnauskas said.
A handful of coral atolls on the equator, some as small as 4 square kilometers (1.54 square miles) in area, may not seem like much.
But Karnauskas’ and Cohen’s results say that waters on the western sides of the islands will warm more slowly than at islands 2 degrees, or 138 miles, north and south of the equator that are not in the path of the EUC.
That gives the Gilbert Islands a significant advantage over neighboring reef systems.
“While the mitigating effect of a strengthened Equatorial Undercurrent will not spare corals the perhaps-inevitable warming expected for this region, the warming rate will be slower around these equatorial islands,” Karnauskas said.
“This may allow corals and their symbiotic algae a better chance to adapt and survive.”
…
“The globe is warming, but there are things going on underfoot that will slow that warming for certain parts of certain coral reef islands,” said Cohen.
“
, who was by then completely exhausted by all this special pleading.
On re-reading, I was even more intrigued by this nugget:
“So Karnauskas and Cohen began to investigate how the EUC would affect the equatorial islands’ reef ecosystems, starting with global climate models that simulate effects in a warming world.”
In other words:
“Assuming that global climate models are correct, as their starting point, . . . .”
Coral scientist?? So who pays people who call themselves “coral scientists” and what do they do?
Answer: Nobody and nothing….until….
I’m no coral scientist but I doubt the ocean temperature going up or down 4/10 of a degree over 150 years will hurt something that’s managed to survive for millions of years but I suppose it’s worth bankrupting the entire civilized world…just in case.
According to IPPC statistics, the sea level rose by about 3 mm every year since 1993.
That’s a whopping 2.6″ also known as a very small puddle.
Low-lying Kiribati suffers from a range of
environmentaltypical problems that have been linked toclimate changebeing an island 10′ above sea level in the middle of the ocean, including storm surges, flooding and water contamination.Mr Teitiota moved to New Zealand in 2007 and overstayed his visa, coming to the attention of police in 2011 over a minor traffic violation.
How ironic, he came back before GLOBAL WARMING™!!!111!!1! propaganda even started and I’m betting he never read Al’s book (published in 2006) and he just happened to invade a place where everyone would love to live and yet, in all this time, his 3rd world hellhole is still there. The ocean has “risen” (allegedly) .6″ since he left.
Yeah, I totally trust scientists who don’t notice things at the edges of maps!
Good Scientist!
… an great Science!!
… over no specific time period that this reporter can ascertain . . .
Bears repeating??
(Your wallet, of course, being Charybdis)
“
, who was by then completely exhausted by all this special pleading.
On re-reading, I was even more intrigued by this nugget:
“So Karnauskas and Cohen began to investigate how the EUC would affect the equatorial islands’ reef ecosystems, starting with global climate models that simulate effects in a warming world.”
In other words:
“Assuming that global climate models are correct, as their starting point, . . . .”
Nice science.
…. working with coral scientist Cohen.
Coral scientist?? So who pays people who call themselves “coral scientists” and what do they do?
Answer: Nobody and nothing….until….
I’m no coral scientist but I doubt the ocean temperature going up or down 4/10 of a degree over 150 years will hurt something that’s managed to survive for millions of years but I suppose it’s worth bankrupting the entire civilized world…just in case.