Environment
Sea Levels Are Rising
Islands ‘Sinking’ From Storm Surges, Causeway Erosion, Not Global Warming
Everybody knows that the South Sea’s once idyllic atolls are disappearing beneath the Pacific Ocean’s global warming driven relentless rise. Pacific political summits have appealed for help. Greenpeace raises money and the media hunt out the early victims.
The atoll nation of Tuvalu this year appealed to Australia to let more of its people in, saying their atolls are disappearing beneath the waves.
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The problem, however is this: the Pacific Ocean has not risen in the last decade. “The data does not support any sea-level rise at all,” says Wolfgang Scherer, the director of Australia’s National Tidal Facility at Flinder’s University in Adelaide. The facility, funded by Australian aid, has over the last decade installed tide gauges across the Pacific, including one at Tuvalu’s capital atoll, Funafuti.
Tuvalu’s 10,500 people live on nine tiny atolls. They are densely packed; 403 people per square kilometer; Australia has 2.4, New Zealand just under one. Kiribati has 111 people per square kilometer.
Tuvalu is pressing Australia and New Zealand to allow more of its people to emigrate but Canberra turned them down. Paani Laupepa of Tuvalu’s Ministry of National Resources told Radio Australia they are expecting to evacuate their people from the atolls within 50 years. Angrily he says Australia should take these environmental refugees.
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“Given the situation in which Australia is producing a lot of pollution into the atmosphere, the Australian government should take the necessary steps to accommodate the people who are suffering from the effects of the pollution,” he said. “If you pollute, you should take responsibility for the actions that you are causing.”
But Scherer says data from Funafuti shows no evidence of sea level rise. “As at June 2001, based on the short-term sea level rise analyses ... for the eight years of data return show a rate of 0.0 mm per year, i.e. no change in average sea level over the period of record.”
They found a major anomaly in 1998, an El Nino year, when sea levels actually fell by 35 centimeters (14 inches). The monitoring project will next year install satellite monitoring equipment that will determine whether the atolls themselves, as distinct from the sea, rise and fall.
“We just don’t know and we really do not have a good understanding at this time of what the regional longer-term sea level change is, or might be,” says Scherer.
He has an explanation for the willingness of Pacific politicians to accept the notion that they are sinking. “When you live there on a day to day basis and you do have water lapping at your feet when you have storm surges coming through it is not a very comfortable experience,” he says.
The historical record, both recent and pre-historic, shows storm surges, which bring the sea across the land, destroying gardens, have long been a fact of life. In places like Kiribati and Majuro, for example, the highest point above sea level is on bridges 11 feet and 20 feet high, respectively; virtually everyone lives about five feet above sea level.
“That is the over-riding psychology behind it,” Scherer says, adding that population pressures are aiding the political drive to move people to Australia and New Zealand. “Sea levels have been rising since the last ice age.”
The issue now was whether human carbon burning was leading to increasing sea levels. “There is no evidence, over the last century, that suggests there will be an acceleration...in sea level,” he says.
In 1999, British media declared they had found the first victims of global warming: two uninhabited islands, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, in Kiribati. The sand islets were in the vast lagoon of Tarawa, the badly polluted and severely over-crowded capital atoll.
What was not reported was that the Kiribati government, with mainly Japanese aid, had linked all of the South Tarawa atolls by causeways. “That causeway has dramatically changed the usual oceanographic patterns, the flushing of the lagoons and such,” Scherer says. On the main islets of Tarawa most families have built their own versions of a sea wall. “Those islands that have sunk were not populated at all and so nobody had done anything and then the normal erosion effects, storm surge effects in particular, take their toll. Once the erosion sets in, Mother Nature does not bring the sand on shore.”
And there has been no sea level rise in Kiribati.
Photo: Michael J. Field
