Pacific Island states will not longer play the patsies for the climate alarmists
By Paul Homewood
Another in Australian MP Craig Kelly’s excellent series for the Spectator Australia:
The science is settled. The time for debate is over. It’s actually better than we thought. The Pacific islands are not sinking under rising sea levels, in fact, the peer-reviewed science shows the exact opposite, the majority of low lying islands are either stable or increasing in size — something even ABC FactCheck was forced to concede.
Nevertheless, this has not stopped climate alarmists led by the Portuguese socialist and UN General Secretary Guterres from denying the peer-reviewed science and exploiting Pacific Island nations, by using them as patsies to peddle fear and misinformation with discredited claims of ”sinking islands”.
And so far, the Pacific islanders have been happy to play along; perhaps driven by a cargo-cult mentality, believing if they utter the magic words ”climate change” and pose for the international media forlornly staring out over the sea, that they might be rewarded with cash handouts from the UN Green Global Climate fund.
But that was all before the Wuhan Flu.
Firstly, the worldwide economic devastation caused by the Wuhan Flu has turned the belief that the UN Green Climate Fund would have US$100 billion cash annually to hand out rivers of gold to Pacific Island nations, into nothing other than a delusional fantasy.
Secondly, the Wuhan flu, by temporarily putting an end to international tourism has given the Pacific Islanders a taste of the dark future they face if the alarmists pushing for “net-zero” get their way and end air travel until the eco-fantasy of electric-powered jumbo-jets powered by unicorn farts and pulled along by flying pigs becomes a reality.
For as Julian Allwood, a professor of Engineering and the Environment at Cambridge University, has recently admitted, the only way of achieving the fabled net-zero emissions in aviation is “by having a substantial period of no aviation at all.”
For an island nation like Fiji, tourism (which is dependent upon international air travel) contributes nearly 40% of their GPD and directly/indirectly employs over 150,000 people out of the nation’s population of around 900,000 — and where airfreight plays a vital role in exports and imports — they are now getting a “trial run” of what life would be like if climate alarmists are successful in enforcing their sinister plans of net-zero.
Currently, with the Wuhan Flu restricting air travel and closing borders, Fiji Airways, the country’s national airline, has already grounded 95 per cent of flights. The Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association (FHTA) says a staggering 279 hotels and resorts have closed, with over 40,000 tourism workers either laid off or sent on leave without pay. And unlike Australia, Fiji doesn’t have a JobKeeper scheme to fall back on.
This current situation has been described as a ‘disaster’, a ‘complete catastrophe’, with livelihoods being destroyed and tens of thousands pushed into dire poverty. And although hopefully this will only be temporary until the travel restrictions are lifted, the Pacific Islanders will quickly realise, that if the climate alarmists get their way, this will become permanent.
And if their fragile economies are in ruins from the permanent decline in tourism brought on by the Climate Alarmists’ enforcement of ‘net zero’, these Pacific island nations will be substantially more vulnerable to not only the next cyclone that strikes but also to the seductive lure of selling their souls for China’s Belt and Road.
Full story here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The very genuine prospect of residents of Pacific Islands returning to living in mud huts should be a message spread to the rest of the world.
Our own economy is only marginally less fragile.
Arguably it might be more fragile. Pacific islanders could just about revert to a primitive existence. We couldn’t.
Pacific islanders could revert to a primitive existence, but not in anything like their current numbers.
In some parts of Southern Africa, even the “mud huts” are collapsing in the rain…
So many on the left mourn for the days when the wonderful natives lived a substance life in huts and dependent upon hunting, fishing and whims of nature. UNTIL it happens to them. Suddenly the romance of that life loses its shine.
Interesting – I hope it’s true. But there’s a problem: who are they going to support? There are no overt AGW sceptics at UN negotiations – everyone, including the majority that has no intention of doing anything about it, is a climate alarmist.
BBC idiot Shukman flew twice to Tuvalu to takes pictures of huts on stilts proving native fears. Being, like so many in the Beeb, functionally illiterate, he had not read Arthur Grimble’s ‘A Pattern of Islands’ published exactly a century earlier. Btw U.K. Wind right now two per cent of demand.
Look what rising seas have done to these poor souls, its Waterworld realised.
The Portuguese socialist no longer cares for all those poor South Pacific souls on sinking islands that he had once cared about when he thought the care would raise $100 billion for the UN climate fund.
He has moved on to the wuhan virus.
This is the in thing now.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/29/numnut-un-bureaucrat/
It should be pointed out that the BBC report depicted about the Pacific atolls not sinking was published in 2010…10 years ago!
“Another study related to sea-level rise (Webb and Kench 2010) appears to contradict the general anticipation that the impacts of climate change will eventually make low-lying reef islands unable to support human occupation. It uses aerial and satellite images taken over the past 60 years, a time during which there is evidence that sea levels have risen, to compare the landform dynamics of 27 atoll islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The study found that as a whole, instead of declining, the islands grew in land area by a total of 63 ha or seven percent. The research findings show that although sea level in the central Pacific Ocean rose by about 2.0 mm/yr over the study period and that all 27 islands changed physically during that time, there is considerable variation in the amount and style of change between and among the islands, with an overall net increase in land area; 86 percent of the islands remained relatively stable or their outline or shape increased in size. Twelve of the 27 islands increased in size by more than three percent but only four islands reduced in area by more than three percent.”
Presumably, the results are still valid. Not ignored by the IPCC, but twisted to emphasize the four reduced in area.
Following a trail blazed by Ancel Keys, keep 7 throw away 15 that contradict your theory.
Thank you Broadlands.
Just for the record, there’s also later stuff about islands supposedly drowning.
One of the most recent and comprehensive research papers on the land area of island nations was presented in 2018 by Dr Virginie Duvat, Professor of Coastal Geography at the University of La Rochelle, in France.
[Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). ‘A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades’. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557]
Here’s an excerpt from Professor Duvat’s paper:-
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that NO ATOLL LOST LAND AREA and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.”
Here’s another excerpt:
“It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size, making this value a relevant threshold to define atoll island areal stability.”
This research applies to the Marshall islands, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Micronesia, Tuvalu, and The Maldives. Despite everything you’ve seen on TV and read about in the newspapers – these islands are NOT BEING INUNDATED OR WASHED AWAY !!!
No island nation in either the Pacific Ocean or the Indian Ocean is drowning.
Not one!
They say that those of us sceptical about manmade climate change are ‘denying the science’. In fact the climate alarmists are the ones doing the denying.
And this holds true for every aspect of the climate scare – whether it be temperatures, floods, fires, sea-level rises, ocean acidification (the oceans are alkaline, always have been), or anything else. I know because I’ve examined the data carefully since 2009.
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, once said: “Make the lie big, keep repeating it, and they will come to believe it.”
So true.
If the money taps get turned back on the islanders will happily support it. Climate aid and disaster aid are now the same thing, we are supposed to believe that these people are already suffering a climate disaster, hanging on to an increasingly perilous existence until they finally become climate refugees.
The UN wants to confiscate the occidental developed world’s wealth and pay it straight into the Islanders bank accounts – free money and no need to work whilst living in an Island paradise – too hard to refuse?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/23/claim-climate-change-requires-streamlining-of-cash-deliveries-to-remote-aid-recipients/
Recent:
https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2019/07/16/pacific-atolls-can-adapt-to-rising-seas-and-extreme-storms—new.html
Compare to most of the stuff here!
https://archive.usgs.gov/archive/sites/walrus.wr.usgs.gov/atolls/index.html
Once again unintended consequences rears its’ ugly head. Having first swallowed the CC Kool Aid now the islanders are realizing they are but pawns in a scam. No free money, they aren’t sinking, and now their very livelihood is threatened.
What the islanders need to understand and very quickly is that the NGOs used, do use them all as wallpaper and their stunts – having tea underwater with bent PMs fab PR for the UN IPCC conference junkets and booger all to do with anything else.
Like a garland ephemeral and gone tomorrow, the Pacific Islanders need to drop the green fantasy and understand that and as were all about to find out – here in the west, , in this world there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The Maldives built new airports while claiming they were all going underwater within a few years. Enough of such nonsense.
How much money do you have to have to take-up residency on any of the Pacific islands?
Very rich ‘celebrities’ from all parts seem to be able to afford it, could you?
This seems a bit naive from Kelly. If I were a Pacific islander I would want i) continued development and ii) the rich western countries to send free money as part of the global climate fund. The two are not incompatible.
Added to which, our share of the global climate fund would likely depend on the level of risk we could claim to have, so we would continue to develop, continue to hold our hands out for dosh, and continue to claim imminent peril. All entirely rational.
Side note: it’s not a good look to have a typo in the title. Perhaps it began as “…will not play the patsies…” and an attempt to change to “…will no longer play the patsies…” was made.
“the Portuguese socialist and UN General Secretary Guterres from denying the peer-reviewed science and exploiting Pacific Island nations, by using them as patsies to peddle fear and misinformation with discredited claims of sinking islands”
I really really detest this portugese socialist. I know that’s not nice. We shouldn’t hate people. I apologize. As they say in china, sollee so sollee.