If the worst case scenario happens and Tuvalu is submerged, how will the state manage to survive even without territory? Is that in the best interest of its citizens? Can any of the nation's collective wealth be preserved, either in the form of an enduring landless state as proposed, or by in some way transferring that wealth as the citizens emigrate somewhere else? Or is this proposal the futile death throes of a state about to be obliterated by a human-made disaster?
These nations will need to make arrangements to migrate to welcoming host nations, that will allow for local governance similar to how tribal lands work in the US.
Wealth could be preserved by seeking restitution from nations according to lifetime emissions (which has led to sea level rise), and creating a trust to manage and distribute the returns from those funds invested to citizens where ever they are. Once submerged, it’s unlikely the land has any value beyond tourism for diving yachties transiting the pacific.
call me cynical, but would any country be willing to give up its land like that? Tribal lands only exist to give back a small fraction of stolen lands back. Would any country give land to another country just for goodwill?
Their problem is not where people will sit (likely NZ will oblige) but that they want to retain control over other territorial claims/benefits such as fishing zone, domain, orbital rights et al.
The fact that they want that does not mean that they will receive that; they may well turn out to be one of the many nations in history who lose their claims. We have an international consensus regarding basic human rights and process for refugees which means that they near certainly will get an ability to resettle somewhere, but their fishing rights may well be divided among the surviving neighbouring nations without any compensation to Tuvalu unless those neighbouring nations just choose to grant some.
By the way, what do you mean by "orbital rights"? IMHO according to the Outer Space Treaty you have only the right to the orbits you are currently actively using with your satellites and nothing more.
I was confused and thought that the Kacific satellite was owned by Tuvalu (as the larger country of Tonga has already done for some time, establishing certain property rights in space). But I looked it up and Tuvalu was merely a customer.
The most likely resolution would be a land purchase in (for example) Fiji along with a grant of autonomous power on that land, in exchange for a fishing lease in Tuvaluan waters.
Fiji gets a share of Tuvaluan fishing grounds, and the Tuvaluans get a place to live AND some protection for their territorial waters by a nation that is still landed.
I thought of that, but didn’t mention it because there are a lot of unknowns like China just straight up ignoring them or how you’d license, govern, and patrol the waters. It’s a valid asset though, good point.
China doesn't have to wait for the islands to submerge to do that. Chinese fishing fleets have violated fishing rules in Ecuadorian waters. The Tuvaluans have no chance when all they have is a few motor dinghies and M-16s.
Other nations that are parties to the Nauru agreement can (and will) do something about it though. Australia, New Zealand, and the United States all take the agreement pretty seriously as well.
On the other hand, both China and Taiwan spread money around in the PNA countries as a form of soft power and to get some level of looking the other way.
Generally speaking, an EEZ is defined as a certain amount of miles from the shoreline of a country. The big question here is the question of: if you no longer have a shoreline, do you get to keep the EEZ of where your shoreline used to be?
we have a group of Pacific Islanders from "somewhere" that relocated into an underused Church property on the next block here.. there is a large parking area and apartments, in addition to the Church itself. The building was obviously lonely, then, presto! full of people.. they speak in a native language and there are a lot of them, all ages.. it has food and events several times a month or more now.. must have been hundreds of people
Sealand isn't a great example considering nobody recognizes it as a country. Tuvalu might get away with it since they would've been a "real" country in the past.
I assume he just meant a platform resembling that although it should be apparent that would come nowhere close to the size, beauty, or natural wealth of the current islands.
That brings to mind some interesting ideas. One of the "business models" for Sealand was to be a "data haven", i.e. offer online hosting of data in a jurisdiction which didn't allow searches or seizures of data or servers. Could Tuvalu provide a similar service, possibly from within the territory of a nation which grants them a legally autonomous region?
Similarly, I wonder what would happen if Tuvalu decided its laws should not recognise copyright as a concept any more. The government could run an official "legal" file-sharing site and other countries would have to decide whether to prevent their own citizens from accessing it. I imagine these other countries would lose a lot of sympathy for the people of Tuvalu if such a site were created, though.
And a liberal democracy that prizes multiculturalism, I absolutely agree they are a good fit. You get all that human capital and goodwill too, it's good business.
Perhaps, perhaps not. In Hawaii there is actually a lot of tension between the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), the Marshallese, and Micronesians. I am not keen as to exactly why this is, but I think it underscores the importance of providing more resources for both the Pacific Islanders already living receiving limited assistance, and the new arrivals. I think the government shouldn't just assume they'll get along because of shared cultural heritage.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but pretty much every nation has at least one other nation that it traditionally looks down upon, usually one that to outsiders seems quite similar and which often have in fact strong ties between them. France and England are a classic example, though maybe a little odd in that it's mutual. (I suppose Argentina and Chile are similar in that regard--each thinks the other is categorically beneath them?) Sometimes there's a clear regional hierarchy, like U.S. -> Mexico -> Guatemala even though it's not necessarily obvious to all involved--U.S. has traditionally looked down on Mexico but doesn't have any sense of a hierarchy beyond that, whereas Mexicans might not care less what people in the U.S. think but certainly feel they're better than Guatemalans. Sometimes it's a non-transitive circle. It can be very complex, and it doesn't have to make any sense, though often it's a simple reflection of comparative wealth or prestige. But it's a universally understood phenomenon. There's the famous quote by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, leader of the Haitian Revolution, who circa 1804 called the Polish "the White Negroes of Europe", exempting them from the murderous extirpation of all white-skinned people in the newly independent state. Fast forward to the 21st century and British prejudice against the Polish (and specifically Polish immigrant laborers) is a major impetus for Brexit.
Anyhow, I've learned to be careful about equivocating nations or cultures. Saying something like, "country X seemed just as nice as Y" might rub someone from X or Y the wrong way.
It's all thinly disguised racism, of course. But it does pose an interesting woke paradox: what if all a nation has left is its prejudice against another nation?
I think it's actually that human cultures are infinitely nested, with every group containing subgroups with some level of disdain towards each other. Conflicts on a higher level often seem to "override" conflicts on the lower levels (although I don't know how often this actually is true). For example: I'm from Finland, and if our team plays hockey against Sweden it's as if there's a war against them or something. However, if Sweden plays against Canada you'll still see people cheer for Sweden over here.
I believe this reveals the existence of a tree-like hierarchy (very loose) of human cultures, and I also believe it goes way lower than just the country level (all the way down to individual people). xkcd also said it a long time ago: https://xkcd.com/1095/
I agree, national enmity is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon. Part of that broader phenomenon is that identity is typically defined, at least in part, in opposition to another group. And identities can nest, intersect, etc.
In context of island erosion, this poses the question of whether a nation without any territory can exist purely in opposition to another similarly situated nation (i.e. both sharing a positive history that is indistinguishable within the context of a broader society to which they've emigrated). And that creates an interesting ethical dilemma if the goal is to preserve national identity, especially one that has been "victimized" by [perpetrators of] global warming.
Tuvalu exists as a state because the international community decided to let them. They export coconuts and fishing licenses for hard currency, and there is no way they could muster the money and hardware to defend their patch of the ocean. So if the same institutions that decided to enable the foundation of the republic of Tuvalu decide to protect Tuvualuan territorial waters as a way to give the Tuvaluan diaspora some source of currency with which to start over where they go, then that is what will be,.
And before that they financed a significant part of their government's budget selling postage stamps to kids like me. Recognized sovereignty can be a source of money in all sorts of ways.
I can already see the Press Release: Meta preserves the Culture and unique Landmarks of Tuvalu on the Metaverse. The State of Tuvalu lives on through the efforts of Meta and is the first fully virtual State.
i can see the headline now, Tuvalu crashed today after a memory leak in the last unity update caused the citizens clients end render to crash when to many npc were on screen at the same time. a patch for tuavalu should be out soem time in the next few days citizens are not recommended to role back to the previous version as it contains a know zero-day exploit.
It is most certainly not true of every state; if no one recognizes your claims, but you can still feed your citizens and defend your borders, you are "a state".
I believe the point the OP was making is that Ukraine, like many other countries, exists because there are limits to the actions its larger, stronger neighbour is willing and able to take.
cf Western Sahara. The international community was not interested in preserving Western Sahara as a state, and so now its entire territory is governed by Morocco, save for some tent cities in a corner of desert the Polisario Front clings to mainly because it'd be bad PR for Morocco to wipe them out.
Ukraine continues to have foreign economic and military aid, while Russia continues to have economic sanctions due to its actions in Ukraine. Just because one country is stronger than another, isn’t the sole deciding factor, but the ability to assert your claims as a matter of fact, rather than law, is certainly key.
The Republic of Minerva, was not a state, because no one cared when Tonga claimed it.
Conversely, Taiwan is a state, even with its bizarre legal status, as it has well defined borders, and de facto foreign recognition and military alliances.
Not strictly true; states that have nuclear weapons are capable of destroying other states, but not necessarily invading, repurposing, and ruling them to the point that their own legal and governmental system is subsumed by the other.
Depends on how big of an army you have. Plenty of states get recognition not because other states want to, but because they have sufficient ability to defend their borders.
> Plenty of states get recognition … because they have sufficient ability to defend their borders.
This is not always the case. There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land (and much more contested areas too, of course) but were never accepted as a state by many (any?) others. Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
I did not say it was always the case. I said "plenty of", not "every".
Life and politics are complicated, and I left plenty of room in my original statement for nuance and counter examples, please do not remove that for me.
> There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land
Unchanging is not the same as uncontested, and I'd argue that IS never had an "unchanging" area of land. Every square foot of IS territory was actively contested, and if you look at the map of its territory over time it moves and shifts and is full of uncontrolled pockets. The nice, clean maps of IS territory on the news were in fact simplifications for easy public consumption. The real situation on the ground was always much more fluid and complex than that. If you look at a map[0] of the actual territory that IS controlled, it is pretty far from the necessary boundaries to run a state. Put bluntly, this is a battle map, not the kind of map that you can make a state out of.
Even the areas that IS held, it did not hold for very long or very securely. Take Tikrit, for example, which IS only held from June 2014 to March 2015, with forces massing for the attack in February. It's hard to argue that a group holds "unchanging" territory when major cities are changing hands every 10 months or so. Furthermore, if an opposing force is able to mass an army outside your city and put siege to it, you are very far away from having "sufficient ability to defend their borders". Given that IS' territorial claims collapsed rather quickly, I think that assertion is pretty good.
> Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
Right, because the war was still on, IS was still trying to seize the land and fortify the borders of what they hoped would eventually be their state. If IS had won or fought the battle to a draw, I have no doubt that they would have gotten roughly the same level of international recognition that say, North Korea gets and they'd stop being "so called". But they didn't do that, so they never stopped being "so called".
Really, the counter example you should have gone for here is Haiti. Haiti unquestionably was capable of defending its borders, and in fact repelled several attempts to retake the island. It also did not get recognized for nearly 20 years by basically anyone until they agreed to reimburse France for the loss of their property, including distastefully the value of the slaves who were now free. While plenty of states get recognized once they manage to successfully hold and defend territory, not every state gets recognized that way. Sometimes other factors dominate, such as the fear of other slave holding states in recognizing the independence of a country created via a slave revolt.
> there is no way they could muster the money and hardware to defend their patch of the ocean.
You also cannot defend a patch of ocean without some land, at least with current technology. War ships require quite a bit of time in dry dock for fueling, refit, and rearmament. And that's before we consider the subpar fighting capability that crews without shore leave would provide.
No, they'd still need to buy or borrow some land, even if they had the hardware to run a moderate navy.
I think the point is even with land there's no way they could actually defend their territory so what difference will it make when their land goes away? They'll be in the same situation they're in now (at least with respect to their sovereignty and existence as a state).
Even with the island fully submerged, I suppose the land won't be far enough underwater that you couldn't build a platform or something with foundations.
They can become a nation where citizens live on boats (if they are ok with that) or on dwellings that exist over water.. or they can increase the height of their island by bringing soil from elsewhere.. or they can make their own islands.
Why not? many countries make their own islands, adjust their coast lands and do other sorts of geoengineering. Building tall platforms isn't that controversial either.
YEah it will be interesting to see how it can be treated if it has no territory . Technically most of UN conventions require territory to be applicable. Territorial waters are defined based on this land, which has to be natural.
Most likely this will be treated like when a country invades and destroys another: .TV will cease to exist and its citizens will be absorbed in other States.
Why should they ever get to a position where they have no land? Even the worst sea-level rise predictions states that the sea level will rise only by around 3 metres in the next 100 years or so and about 10m by 2300.
3m is just around 9ft. And we are talking about less than 12000 people living in about 25sq.km of land. It would be trivial to increase the height of the land by a couple of metres.
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta has had observer status at the UN since the early 1990s despite having no territory.[0] They issue their own passports and enters intro treaties like a regular state.
So does the Red Cross and the International Olympic Committee [1]. And if you scroll up you see so do many "banks".
UN Observer status is most often used to discuss the status of states like Palestines but it has less of an implication of being a sovereign "state" than people think.
I'm not really optimistic for Tuvalu, I'm guessing their culture may out last any legal standing. But I've learned in history the idea of the modern state with its political borders and such is kind of a novelty. For some people, it's just pointless lines drawn by Europeans from long ago (e.g. Pashtuns on the Afghan/Pakistan border) and others it's something like an inconvenience (e.g. rich people who live anywhere they want, corporations putting their profit far from their headquarters, etc.,) - wish stories like Tuvalu would further the discussion on the role of the nation-state in the modern world, because it looks like we're probably going to have a lot of refugee crises in the decades to come. In a way the world is getting smaller all the time and we even have more people going to space than ever, its own thing beyond geopolitical borders.
So have we moved from "climate change isn't real" to "it's real but we aren't gonna do anything"? Nobody making long term plans is questioning the science of it, they're just trying to figure out how to be the last ones to starve.
If we were really going to prevent catastrophic climate change the realistic time to act would have be probably 50-70 years ago.
I've become fairly patient with climate deniers over the years since it is both a difficult to imagine idea and contains serious amounts of existential dread, making it very hard to reason about. Because of the latter I don't know anyone, climate scientists and myself included, that aren't in some way climate change deniers.
The only possible pathway to dramatically reduced carbon intensity in our economy is the potential of physical resource limitations, not intentional human action. If you study the way energy impacts our civilization (highly recommend Smil's "Energy and Civilization"), it's fairly obvious, if not hard to swallow, that we cannot reduce carbon emissions radically enough in a short enough time span without also destroying the global economy. Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.
That destruction, on the timeline somewhere in the next 100 years, is inevitable anyway, but nobody really wants to suffer now when the more extreme suffering we're putting off might be in 20 or even 60 years.
This is really the heart of the problem: the immediate cost of addressing climate change has always seemed too high given the perceived uncertainty of outcomes. In 1950 it would have been fantastically easier to put a cap on carbon emissions than today, but the real threat of climate change was more than a lifetime away, and seemed ludicrous to even most educated people.
But today, meeting the emissions goals required would make the pandemic seem like black Friday as far as economic activity goes. And at the same time, while we know the impact of climate change will be bad, we still don't really know how much we'll each live through and how bad it will be immediately. Maybe we'll see the AMOC shutdown in our lifetimes and Europe will suffer massive crop failure and starvation... and maybe it will just get unlivably hot at the equator, and people from the American Southwest will have to move to the Northeast.
As many have pointed out, the pandemic is basically a toy problem version of climate change. In order to really prevent the pandemic we would have had to globally shut down the economy for a few months, much like China did. The problem is if we did that and prevented the pandemic, our world today would remain an imagined counterfactual that would not be perceived as worth the harm by the majority. We completely failed to address pandemic, and we will completely fail to address climate change. We'll find out what that means.
Much of what you say is true. We could theoretically still avoid catastrophic change and stay below 1.5 degrees but I’m increasingly doubtful of that after COP26 and pitiful net zero (instead of net negative) commitments
Solar Geoengineering is something that could be considered. It is underfunded these days but we should do a better job of studying & modeling it’s effects if we ever hope to deploy it. Heck I think these island nations should deploy geoengineering techniques today. Albeit that last statement is partially in jest because the technology isn’t there yet. (It could have downstream consequences in the rest of the world, but clearly the rest of the world has geoengineered the climate using fossil fuels. These nations deserve a chance
to protect their homes even if the method is drastic.)
That would require a high degree of international trust and cooperation (as it could be turned into a super weapon with only a little imagination). For something like that to happen, there often needs to be a clear and unambiguous external threat that is ‘worse’
No. The heart of the problem is this narrative.
Granted, you paint the picture that is the prevalent narrative, but narratives can change.
There are profitable solutions out there today and many have a potential to scale. Paul Hawken has done some great work recently describing them and calculating their contribution potential (https://drawdown.org and https://regeneration.org)
I agree. We have lacked, still lack, will continue to lack, the ability to work cohesively at a planet scale to address climate change. That's the brutal, fundamental truth. Short of a tremendous shift in power structure, our future is to mitigate some damage with renewables, but ultimately only stop using fossil fuels when it becomes completely uneconomical to do so for every use case.
We will probably geoengineer local solutions so that the human race is not in any real danger of extinction but it won't be the nice high-flyin good times we have now.
No, but the resources spent in saving Tuvalu could be better used in rehoming its people elsewhere. This is a horrible thing to contemplate, of course, but I'm afraid that, lacking the resources to protect themselves, this is what will end up happening.
Which is ironic in some ways since even a complete end to climate change wouldn't make Tuvalu a reasonable place to try to live. Poor soil, no fresh ground water, minimal other resources, and even without sea levels rising the islands would still be sinking. Islands like this come and go (on geological time scales) independent of any human-induced climate change. When they're no longer viable the residents migrate somewhere else. I'm not trying to downplay the real disruption involved for the very small group that's made their home there for the past few centuries, but they're not victims of climate change to any meaningful degree; this is simply how life works for people who settle in places like Tuvalu.
If you really believe what you say, then find a way to short beachfront real estate and reinvest that humongous profit into fixing climate when shit hits the fan.
By the time shit hits the fan, it'll be too late. You can't "fix" the climate, you can only prevent it from getting to a state that needs fixing. (And we're failing at that)
Climate change is a collective action problem, just like the pandemic was.
If 80% of people took precautions to keep from getting covid, and 20% went out and lived their life, the decision of the 80% to stay inside was irrelevant because the 20% would keep the virus in circulation.
If 80% of people stop buying fossil fuels, and 20% of people buy 500% more fossil fuels because the price is falling...
I don't think it's feasible with local resources. Breakwaters would help with coastal erosion, but, if done wrong, would cause enormous damage to coastal ecosystems.
The land area of Fulafuti is 2.4 square kilometers, but the total area of the atoll is 275 square kilometers: it's a ring of islands surrounding a lagoon. The lagoon is 120 feet deep. The atoll is basically the tip-top of a vast underwater mountain that drops away precipitously: there's nothing to build a dike on.
Well that's pessimistic! If there's any justice in the world then the rising sea levels will be compensated by an generous outpouring of plastics into the ocean and a corresponding increase in the density of the PTI.
The atolls are made of coral - the rock of the top of the volcanic mountain is more than half a kilometre (> 500 yards) below.
- Drilling explorations at Funafuti from 1896 to 1898 resulted in 340 m long cores comprising shallow-water carbonates. Subsequent analysis of the drill cores suggests a subsidence rate for Funafuti of approximately 30 m/Ma [30 metres per million año/year].
- report on a refraction line in Nukufetau lagoon, concluding that volcanics are capped by approximately 760 m of limestones.
> Kofe said he delivered the video address, scheduled to be aired at COP26 on Tuesday, in a place that used to be dry land, adding that Tuvalu was seeing a lot of coastal erosion.
Coastal erosion, not climate change, not rising sea levels.
>Coastal erosion is the loss or displacement of land, or the long-term removal of sediment and rocks along the coastline due to the action of waves, currents, tides, wind-driven water, waterborne ice, or other impacts of storms.
>According to the IPCC, sea level rise caused by climate change will increase coastal erosion worldwide, significantly changing the coasts and low-lying coastal areas.
Check any of the NOAA charts and chances are excellent that you'll see the seas rising at, say, 2mm/year, and that there has been no acceleration in the rate for over a hundred years.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_us.html
Yes, one of the causes of coastal erosion can be the effects of climate change. But what is the likelihood that the cause, or even partial cause, of this particular coastal erosion is climate change? I could be wrong, but I doubt that that causation is readily provable in this case. Hence some people that value a strong, empirical case for things like this will tend to take it more as theater than science. I personally think that stunts like this hurt rather than help the cause. But that's just my two cents.
When the sea levels rise a significant amount, sure. How much additional coastal erosion does IPCC think we’re getting now, with sea levels up like 4 inches?
My point is that there’s no reason to think that the land Tuvalu has lost has anything to do with climate change. Pretending otherwise is pure theater.
"Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report."
That's 14 cm of elevation on sea level alone.
Coastal erosion can be mitigated, but I don't think Tuvalu has the resources to build and deploy the required amount of breakwaters required to protect the island themselves. Climate change is something that has to be addressed at a global level.
Hah, I'm glad I'm not as brainwashed as you. But oh well, you think you're the clear thinking one and I'm the brainwashed one.
I'd try to convince you, but well, I think it'd be a waste of my energy, and I don't care enough to spend that energy for yet another idiot roaming the world thinking "It's all a giant conspiracy!". Besides, you've heard it all and you know you won't be fooled.
I mean I think AGW is obviously a thing. I’m just not so convinced that “the world is burning” or that the direst projections are anything but… theater.
And when people take things that were not caused by climate change, point at them and scream “LOOK, CLIMATE CHANGE,” they’re not doing any favors for the rationality cause.
I think this is the premise of 1995 Sci-Fi channel classic CARVER'S GATE -- in a grim future where the planet's ecosystem is ruined and its remaining inhabitants struggle to survive, anybody who can afford spends all their time inside their VR helmets living out escapist fantasies.
The motivating issue in that film is that a bunch of people play video games, a scientist invents a tool that allows the Doom monsters to come back to earth, and a QA engineer has to hunt them down before they destroy the remaining shreds of humanity. That part is of course unrealistic but otherwise the Metaverse narrative plausibly matches this Michael Parée classic.
Maybe we should start a petition for Twitch to start donating a portion of their profits towards ensuring Tuvalu can keep existing in some form or another... perhaps ideally a fund which can be used to relocate citizens when the island is no longer inhabitable?
Moderation comments are about the site rules. They're off-topic, but that's (alas) a necessary evil in order to prevent the system from ending up in well-known failure modes.
If you'd please stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it, and I'd personally appreciate because it would mean fewer tedious moderation comments.
I understand why they are trying to do that but the effort is ridiculous and shows the inadequacy of last centuries' institutions to deal with the current challenges. Reactive in nature as humanity is, nothing will be done until well past due and many will suffer because of it.
Ken Liu has a relevant short story [1] - set in a future Earth where climate change and rising sea levels have forced people to live on floating settlements. It's also included in his collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
The time is now to dredge and dump, and build fixed oceanic platforms at their territorial extremes, while the construction crews can still breathe air and weld cheaply.
The only motivation any other country has to preserve the EEZ of Tuvalu is to prevent Chinese fishermen from overfishing that part of the ocean into a dead zone, or Chinese excavators drilling all the oil/minerals out of the seabed. So they should play up that aspect, and then they may attract the necessary investment to make a big enough pile of sand at the right coordinates.
Others are citing various examples of states without territory, such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta or various governments-in-exile throughout history, so I thought I'd throw Estonia into the ring, which has its government backed up in Luxembourg in case the Russians invade: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/data-embassy/
I'm certain it would be more than Tuvalu could afford, unless they were granted the money by the UN, which seems unlikely. I also can't help but think the dirt would eventually be washed away regardless. The kind of land reclamation places like the Netherlands do isn't applicable on Pacific Low Islands.
China has experience growing islands in the ocean. They are also the biggest polluter right now and they can afford the cost. If Tuvalu allows them to build a naval base in return maybe the US will get involved just to prevent that.
My understanding is that the Spratly Islands base China has built is not something that can actually sustain a population trying to live traditionally. They've destroyed the reefs and encircled the dredged area with a sea wall that prevents normal sand beaches from existing. While the terraformed island would be above water, you wouldn't have the kind of ecosystem that is viable or productive.
That could work for Tuvalu, but I hope you realize that if everyone just used that solution to address the sea-level rise due to global warming, you'd end up greatly accelerating both global warming and sea level rise...
That's 2.6 * 10^8 cubic meters of compacted dirt and rock needed to raise the island by 10m-- which is more than 1500 kg/cubic meter (1.5 tonnes/cubic meter).
The largest bulk carriers manage about 400,000 DWT.
So, about 1000 trips of the largest around... ignoring the logistical and ecological challenges of procuring that much material and using it to raise the island in a durable way.
Why not give the cost of that operation to every Tuvaluan, along with a promise that they and their family can emigrate to a country of their choosing?
I'm not sure how much you need to raise the island. Just matching sea level rise isn't enough, because Tuvalu would really be better off being a couple meters higher to reduce storm damages before climate change started, and climate change both raises the seas and makes intense storms more common.
But more importantly than the amount you need to raise the islands: 26 sq km * 1 meter probably doesn't raise the islands anywhere close to 1 meter, because of:
* Early losses from erosion and compaction
* The angle of repose around the islands (you can't just build the island straight up 1 meter).
Should be possible to compute. Let's user 3 meters of sand with a density of 1600kg/m^3. So you ned 326100010001600 = 124.8 billion kg. The largest containerships can do something like 200k DWT (2.032*10^8 kg). So just above 614 trips...
A) the container ships could tolerate containers full of dirt and rock (nope-- each of these 2-TEU containers would weigh 100 tonnes... compare to gross tonnage of ~200000 tonnes and you're only moving 2000 such containers in a load),
B) the containers themselves could safely tolerate this much mass & weight (nope),
and
B) raising the island 1 meter is enough (probably nope).
The image of the government official standing in the water "on what used to be dry land" is quite dramatic.[1]
Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
> The image of the government official standing in the water "on what used to be dry land" is quite dramatic.[1]
> Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
> A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
Summarizing is a thing journalists do to make things more accessible to lay readers, but that didn't work in your case, so I'll expand with common resources and research from ten seconds worth of googling.
Of course coastal erosion is caused by wave action. However, the reason it is a problem is because of mangrove deforestation. Over half of the Pacific islands' mangroves have been rapidly destroyed by human development efforts just in the last 20 years.
Mangroves are the natural, first and best line of defense against coastal erosion. They create soil. Without either mangroves or manmade seawalls, it doesn't matter what the sea level is - the coast will erode at an unsustainable rate.
It really grinds my gears that "solving climate change" - the hardest problem to solve - is presented as a panacea for what are really more complex environmental issues which actually happen to have simpler solutions.
Known at least as far back as 15 years ago: "Rising sea levels caused by global warming are posing a threat to mangroves and therefore communities in Pacific island nations, according to [the United Nations]" (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jul/17/climatec...)
There is no question that mangroves can save shoreline, today.
The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
>The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
> There is no question that mangroves can save shoreline, today.
> The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
> > The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
> Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise
Did anyone think it to be the case? That the sea levels have risen a meter already and we just haven't tuned in to the news recently enough to learn about it?
"Over four decades, there had been a net increase in land area of the islets of 73.5 ha (2.9%), although the changes are not uniform, with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size. The sea level at the Funafuti tide gauge has risen at 3.9 mm per year, which is approximately twice the global average."
I thought it really funny and disingenuous when the article quoted “We didn't think it would go viral as we saw over the last few days. We have been very pleased with that and hopefully that carries the message and emphasises the challenges that we are facing in Tuvalu at the moment,"
I’m sure they were completely shocked by their carefully staged and promoted photo op.
So, I know most people on HN are just environmental junkies tied to the environmental industrial complex's teat.
But it's pretty cool for the rest of us normies, we are making islands and will continue to make islands. Tuvalu will just keep on growing.
It's important to keep them beautiful as they grow, that means not just filling in the atoll or something crazy but growing into the sea, but as technology gets better hopefully they will just get more beautiful. That's what we need to keep on top of. Continue to increase their size but keep them beautiful.
There is a large movement towards distributed statehood/citizenship built on the view that people should treat the government as a service or utility and not overlord. Cue micronations, charter cities, e-residency, and tax havens schemes. The fascinating idea that people can renegotiate and redefine their relationship with the land, the government, and the economy of that state, is a very 21st century concept, but one that is progressing rapidly on the back of Internet, global shipping, digital nomads, borderless visa areas, cryptocurrency, and metaverse.
When this idea has developed to maturity, it is not inconceivable that states can be virtual, territoryless, and still represents a sizeable demography, collects tax and manages assets, and provides laws and order for that group.
Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level. Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.
So they're talking about something that might happen in 900 years, if current trends hold (and we all know that all trends noted by the best scientists of 13th century totally proved to be accurate). And yet the article treats it as a problem that needs to be discussed right now, complete with a picture of an official standing knee-deep in water, and descriptions of how old people prepare to "go down with the land" (they must not be that old if they plan to live for several hundreds of years longer...)
This looks like cheap theatrics using real events to present scenarios which aren't relevant and probably won't be anytime worth talking about. I mean, there's surely coastal erosion problem but not from the 0.5cm per year thing.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadWealth could be preserved by seeking restitution from nations according to lifetime emissions (which has led to sea level rise), and creating a trust to manage and distribute the returns from those funds invested to citizens where ever they are. Once submerged, it’s unlikely the land has any value beyond tourism for diving yachties transiting the pacific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_in_exile
By the way, what do you mean by "orbital rights"? IMHO according to the Outer Space Treaty you have only the right to the orbits you are currently actively using with your satellites and nothing more.
Galicia: the local king.
Calling the Britons "British" and Anglo-Saxons "English" is confusing... Usually those terms are used for modern Great Britain and modern English.
Tribal lands exist largely so that those resistant to integration will stay out of the way of colonizers.
Fiji gets a share of Tuvaluan fishing grounds, and the Tuvaluans get a place to live AND some protection for their territorial waters by a nation that is still landed.
On the other hand, both China and Taiwan spread money around in the PNA countries as a form of soft power and to get some level of looking the other way.
Probably there still few advantages to be recognized as nation. Being Tax shelter and selling domains(.tv is somewhat popular) comes to mind.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
Similarly, I wonder what would happen if Tuvalu decided its laws should not recognise copyright as a concept any more. The government could run an official "legal" file-sharing site and other countries would have to decide whether to prevent their own citizens from accessing it. I imagine these other countries would lose a lot of sympathy for the people of Tuvalu if such a site were created, though.
Anyhow, I've learned to be careful about equivocating nations or cultures. Saying something like, "country X seemed just as nice as Y" might rub someone from X or Y the wrong way.
It's all thinly disguised racism, of course. But it does pose an interesting woke paradox: what if all a nation has left is its prejudice against another nation?
I believe this reveals the existence of a tree-like hierarchy (very loose) of human cultures, and I also believe it goes way lower than just the country level (all the way down to individual people). xkcd also said it a long time ago: https://xkcd.com/1095/
In context of island erosion, this poses the question of whether a nation without any territory can exist purely in opposition to another similarly situated nation (i.e. both sharing a positive history that is indistinguishable within the context of a broader society to which they've emigrated). And that creates an interesting ethical dilemma if the goal is to preserve national identity, especially one that has been "victimized" by [perpetrators of] global warming.
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81337086
This is true of every state. If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
> If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
Ukraine only fits one.
cf Western Sahara. The international community was not interested in preserving Western Sahara as a state, and so now its entire territory is governed by Morocco, save for some tent cities in a corner of desert the Polisario Front clings to mainly because it'd be bad PR for Morocco to wipe them out.
The Republic of Minerva, was not a state, because no one cared when Tonga claimed it.
Conversely, Taiwan is a state, even with its bizarre legal status, as it has well defined borders, and de facto foreign recognition and military alliances.
Monaco remains a country, because of interference by France, and the fact that they’d be severely sanctioned by EU and the rest of their allies.
This is not always the case. There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land (and much more contested areas too, of course) but were never accepted as a state by many (any?) others. Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
I did not say it was always the case. I said "plenty of", not "every".
Life and politics are complicated, and I left plenty of room in my original statement for nuance and counter examples, please do not remove that for me.
> There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land
Unchanging is not the same as uncontested, and I'd argue that IS never had an "unchanging" area of land. Every square foot of IS territory was actively contested, and if you look at the map of its territory over time it moves and shifts and is full of uncontrolled pockets. The nice, clean maps of IS territory on the news were in fact simplifications for easy public consumption. The real situation on the ground was always much more fluid and complex than that. If you look at a map[0] of the actual territory that IS controlled, it is pretty far from the necessary boundaries to run a state. Put bluntly, this is a battle map, not the kind of map that you can make a state out of.
Even the areas that IS held, it did not hold for very long or very securely. Take Tikrit, for example, which IS only held from June 2014 to March 2015, with forces massing for the attack in February. It's hard to argue that a group holds "unchanging" territory when major cities are changing hands every 10 months or so. Furthermore, if an opposing force is able to mass an army outside your city and put siege to it, you are very far away from having "sufficient ability to defend their borders". Given that IS' territorial claims collapsed rather quickly, I think that assertion is pretty good.
> Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
Right, because the war was still on, IS was still trying to seize the land and fortify the borders of what they hoped would eventually be their state. If IS had won or fought the battle to a draw, I have no doubt that they would have gotten roughly the same level of international recognition that say, North Korea gets and they'd stop being "so called". But they didn't do that, so they never stopped being "so called".
Really, the counter example you should have gone for here is Haiti. Haiti unquestionably was capable of defending its borders, and in fact repelled several attempts to retake the island. It also did not get recognized for nearly 20 years by basically anyone until they agreed to reimburse France for the loss of their property, including distastefully the value of the slaves who were now free. While plenty of states get recognized once they manage to successfully hold and defend territory, not every state gets recognized that way. Sometimes other factors dominate, such as the fear of other slave holding states in recognizing the independence of a country created via a slave revolt.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State#/media/File:Near...
You also cannot defend a patch of ocean without some land, at least with current technology. War ships require quite a bit of time in dry dock for fueling, refit, and rearmament. And that's before we consider the subpar fighting capability that crews without shore leave would provide.
No, they'd still need to buy or borrow some land, even if they had the hardware to run a moderate navy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMTSS_Te_Mataili_II_(802)
Most likely this will be treated like when a country invades and destroys another: .TV will cease to exist and its citizens will be absorbed in other States.
3m is just around 9ft. And we are talking about less than 12000 people living in about 25sq.km of land. It would be trivial to increase the height of the land by a couple of metres.
So, trade could bring wood, materials, solar, desalinaton. If done slowly, over years, as parts submerge, it wouldn't be a massive outlay at once.
I agree.. not cheap, but individual citizens have to buy building materials currently, their new houses would just be on stilts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
UN Observer status is most often used to discuss the status of states like Palestines but it has less of an implication of being a sovereign "state" than people think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
The only somewhat comparable thing afaik is the Holy See, but that at least has sovereignty over some land (the vatican).
[1] although this status is sometimes questioned
So now the plan is just 'improvise, adapt and overcome'.
I've become fairly patient with climate deniers over the years since it is both a difficult to imagine idea and contains serious amounts of existential dread, making it very hard to reason about. Because of the latter I don't know anyone, climate scientists and myself included, that aren't in some way climate change deniers.
The only possible pathway to dramatically reduced carbon intensity in our economy is the potential of physical resource limitations, not intentional human action. If you study the way energy impacts our civilization (highly recommend Smil's "Energy and Civilization"), it's fairly obvious, if not hard to swallow, that we cannot reduce carbon emissions radically enough in a short enough time span without also destroying the global economy. Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.
That destruction, on the timeline somewhere in the next 100 years, is inevitable anyway, but nobody really wants to suffer now when the more extreme suffering we're putting off might be in 20 or even 60 years.
This is really the heart of the problem: the immediate cost of addressing climate change has always seemed too high given the perceived uncertainty of outcomes. In 1950 it would have been fantastically easier to put a cap on carbon emissions than today, but the real threat of climate change was more than a lifetime away, and seemed ludicrous to even most educated people.
But today, meeting the emissions goals required would make the pandemic seem like black Friday as far as economic activity goes. And at the same time, while we know the impact of climate change will be bad, we still don't really know how much we'll each live through and how bad it will be immediately. Maybe we'll see the AMOC shutdown in our lifetimes and Europe will suffer massive crop failure and starvation... and maybe it will just get unlivably hot at the equator, and people from the American Southwest will have to move to the Northeast.
As many have pointed out, the pandemic is basically a toy problem version of climate change. In order to really prevent the pandemic we would have had to globally shut down the economy for a few months, much like China did. The problem is if we did that and prevented the pandemic, our world today would remain an imagined counterfactual that would not be perceived as worth the harm by the majority. We completely failed to address pandemic, and we will completely fail to address climate change. We'll find out what that means.
Solar Geoengineering is something that could be considered. It is underfunded these days but we should do a better job of studying & modeling it’s effects if we ever hope to deploy it. Heck I think these island nations should deploy geoengineering techniques today. Albeit that last statement is partially in jest because the technology isn’t there yet. (It could have downstream consequences in the rest of the world, but clearly the rest of the world has geoengineered the climate using fossil fuels. These nations deserve a chance to protect their homes even if the method is drastic.)
There are profitable solutions out there today and many have a potential to scale. Paul Hawken has done some great work recently describing them and calculating their contribution potential (https://drawdown.org and https://regeneration.org)
I consider myself sane, and I would take that option.
Then again, I also resent that the banks were bailed out during the gfc, for fear of "destroying the economy".
What does destroying the economy mean? The factories would still stand. The knowledge, science still exist.
We will probably geoengineer local solutions so that the human race is not in any real danger of extinction but it won't be the nice high-flyin good times we have now.
Climate change is a real problem for them. But in terms of the cold calculus of global impact, the fate of Tuvalu is relatively minor.
If you really believe what you say, then go and act. A time of great crisis is also a time of great opportunity.
People like you trying to push the responsibility on the individual is why humanity will go extinct.
tldr - if you really believed in a climate crisis you'd be acting differently.
If 80% of people took precautions to keep from getting covid, and 20% went out and lived their life, the decision of the 80% to stay inside was irrelevant because the 20% would keep the virus in circulation.
If 80% of people stop buying fossil fuels, and 20% of people buy 500% more fossil fuels because the price is falling...
Yes, but it's rude to talk about it. Like not mentioning politics at Thanksgiving dinner so we can pretend we all agree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funafuti
https://tuvalu-data.sprep.org/system/files/Rapport_de_leve_C...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
- Drilling explorations at Funafuti from 1896 to 1898 resulted in 340 m long cores comprising shallow-water carbonates. Subsequent analysis of the drill cores suggests a subsidence rate for Funafuti of approximately 30 m/Ma [30 metres per million año/year].
- report on a refraction line in Nukufetau lagoon, concluding that volcanics are capped by approximately 760 m of limestones.
The pdf has great information.
> Kofe said he delivered the video address, scheduled to be aired at COP26 on Tuesday, in a place that used to be dry land, adding that Tuvalu was seeing a lot of coastal erosion.
Coastal erosion, not climate change, not rising sea levels.
>According to the IPCC, sea level rise caused by climate change will increase coastal erosion worldwide, significantly changing the coasts and low-lying coastal areas.
Interesting.
My point is that there’s no reason to think that the land Tuvalu has lost has anything to do with climate change. Pretending otherwise is pure theater.
That's 14 cm of elevation on sea level alone.
Coastal erosion can be mitigated, but I don't think Tuvalu has the resources to build and deploy the required amount of breakwaters required to protect the island themselves. Climate change is something that has to be addressed at a global level.
edit: math correction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
I'd try to convince you, but well, I think it'd be a waste of my energy, and I don't care enough to spend that energy for yet another idiot roaming the world thinking "It's all a giant conspiracy!". Besides, you've heard it all and you know you won't be fooled.
And when people take things that were not caused by climate change, point at them and scream “LOOK, CLIMATE CHANGE,” they’re not doing any favors for the rationality cause.
The motivating issue in that film is that a bunch of people play video games, a scientist invents a tool that allows the Doom monsters to come back to earth, and a QA engineer has to hunt them down before they destroy the remaining shreds of humanity. That part is of course unrealistic but otherwise the Metaverse narrative plausibly matches this Michael Parée classic.
All that leads to predictable and lower-quality discussion. We'd like the vector to point the opposite way here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you'd please stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it, and I'd personally appreciate because it would mean fewer tedious moderation comments.
[1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dispatches-from-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cipd-wuHHc0
The only motivation any other country has to preserve the EEZ of Tuvalu is to prevent Chinese fishermen from overfishing that part of the ocean into a dead zone, or Chinese excavators drilling all the oil/minerals out of the seabed. So they should play up that aspect, and then they may attract the necessary investment to make a big enough pile of sand at the right coordinates.
The largest bulk carriers manage about 400,000 DWT.
So, about 1000 trips of the largest around... ignoring the logistical and ecological challenges of procuring that much material and using it to raise the island in a durable way.
I hope the math for how much it costs isn’t so low as to be sad to fix this problem in the wrong way.
Why not give the cost of that operation to every Tuvaluan, along with a promise that they and their family can emigrate to a country of their choosing?
But more importantly than the amount you need to raise the islands: 26 sq km * 1 meter probably doesn't raise the islands anywhere close to 1 meter, because of:
* Early losses from erosion and compaction
* The angle of repose around the islands (you can't just build the island straight up 1 meter).
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28srt%2829%29*1000...
A) the container ships could tolerate containers full of dirt and rock (nope-- each of these 2-TEU containers would weigh 100 tonnes... compare to gross tonnage of ~200000 tonnes and you're only moving 2000 such containers in a load),
B) the containers themselves could safely tolerate this much mass & weight (nope),
and
B) raising the island 1 meter is enough (probably nope).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_carrier
But as long as people were doing the container ship math, I figured I'd point out the problems with it.
Note you're using 29 vs. the grandparent's 26, too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
[1]https://www.reuters.com/resizer/8doSEMId31ayO3rBn1MaCzPgW50=...
> Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
> A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
Summarizing is a thing journalists do to make things more accessible to lay readers, but that didn't work in your case, so I'll expand with common resources and research from ten seconds worth of googling.
"As global sea level rises, the action of waves at higher elevations increases the likelihood for extensive coastal erosion. " (https://toolkit.climate.gov/topics/coastal-flood-risk/coasta...)
"Sea level rise shown to drive coastal erosion" (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/00EO...)
Please don't assume malice.
Of course coastal erosion is caused by wave action. However, the reason it is a problem is because of mangrove deforestation. Over half of the Pacific islands' mangroves have been rapidly destroyed by human development efforts just in the last 20 years.
Mangroves are the natural, first and best line of defense against coastal erosion. They create soil. Without either mangroves or manmade seawalls, it doesn't matter what the sea level is - the coast will erode at an unsustainable rate.
It really grinds my gears that "solving climate change" - the hardest problem to solve - is presented as a panacea for what are really more complex environmental issues which actually happen to have simpler solutions.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912045029/climate-change-may-...
Even if logging is a concern, the mangroves wouldn't be as protective as you're implying.
Directly related reading:
"Mangroves in Tuvalu are threatened by various factors such as coastal erosion, pollution and on a long term basis the sea level rise due to global warming." (https://www.fao.org/forestry/9011-09d32b158b21752798b87b0378...)
Known at least as far back as 15 years ago: "Rising sea levels caused by global warming are posing a threat to mangroves and therefore communities in Pacific island nations, according to [the United Nations]" (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jul/17/climatec...)
The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
>The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
https://therevelator.org/mangroves-climate-change/
On an unrelated note, I am glad that you are doing some research and hopefully learning a bit along the way.
> The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
> > The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
> https://therevelator.org/mangroves-climate-change/
> On an unrelated note, I am glad that you are doing some research and hopefully learning a bit along the way.
Please reread your own sources. Your own source concludes in the paragraph following the one you cited that:
"Based on projected rates, mangrove trees could lose their race against rising water within the next 30 years."
See a few others which may be related:
http://www.tuvalu-overview.tv/pdf/mangrove_manual.pdf
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/11812/...
Tldr: climate change begets soil erosion, which leads to loss of land mass... which disappears islands.
Let's stop disputing the obvious just to be a contrarian. Thanks, back to work for me. Wish you the best.
Did anyone think it to be the case? That the sea levels have risen a meter already and we just haven't tuned in to the news recently enough to learn about it?
You would be suprised if you knew how many people think oceans will be boiling in 50 years
"Over four decades, there had been a net increase in land area of the islets of 73.5 ha (2.9%), although the changes are not uniform, with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size. The sea level at the Funafuti tide gauge has risen at 3.9 mm per year, which is approximately twice the global average."
Tuvalu won't be submerged for centuries even in the worst case scenarios.
They will have incrementally increasing problems from it decade by decade. But that press release will not go anywhere.
I’m sure they were completely shocked by their carefully staged and promoted photo op.
So, I know most people on HN are just environmental junkies tied to the environmental industrial complex's teat.
But it's pretty cool for the rest of us normies, we are making islands and will continue to make islands. Tuvalu will just keep on growing.
It's important to keep them beautiful as they grow, that means not just filling in the atoll or something crazy but growing into the sea, but as technology gets better hopefully they will just get more beautiful. That's what we need to keep on top of. Continue to increase their size but keep them beautiful.
FACT CHECK Is the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu growing, and not sinking https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-19/fact-check-is-the-isl...
When this idea has developed to maturity, it is not inconceivable that states can be virtual, territoryless, and still represents a sizeable demography, collects tax and manages assets, and provides laws and order for that group.
Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level. Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.
So they're talking about something that might happen in 900 years, if current trends hold (and we all know that all trends noted by the best scientists of 13th century totally proved to be accurate). And yet the article treats it as a problem that needs to be discussed right now, complete with a picture of an official standing knee-deep in water, and descriptions of how old people prepare to "go down with the land" (they must not be that old if they plan to live for several hundreds of years longer...)
This looks like cheap theatrics using real events to present scenarios which aren't relevant and probably won't be anytime worth talking about. I mean, there's surely coastal erosion problem but not from the 0.5cm per year thing.