I propose to to all of us to consider from now on to form one sociocultural group called United Tribes of Melanesia or Union of Melanesian Tribes and Islands as a Pan Melanesian-ism for Survival and Common Destiny, that in long term will become the United States of Melanesia.
The Background
We cannot depend on MSG as it is fully controlled by colonial masters to continue serve their interests and needs.
We cannot stay inside colonial mapping and naming and think that our work with colonial borders will bring changes for good to our peoples in long term. We are lying to our own instinct, we are acting against the voice of the spirit inside us.
Climate change threatens our survival, we need to immediately respond to this existential threat to our small islands and tribes by mobilising unification and collective consolidation to save our future.
Many parts of the world, different societies and humans are busy talking about and taking steps to get out from this existential threat. Melanesian and South Pacific region has become one of the major areas where threated by global warming and climate change. We, the people, Melanesians, are not doing anything as a people. We are putting too much hope on our Prime Ministers and Presidents to work for our survival. We are totally wrong. They are serving their own political and financial and family interests. They are serving the masters, the colonial powers, particularly the United States, Australia, France, and England. They are not that concerned about many islands and tribes in Melanesia will disappear in 100 years, if not 1000 years from now.
We need to wake up! We need to get up! We have to stand up! We must speak up! Step up our actions to protect our own being, to determine our own destiny after our small islands disappear into the deep Blue Continent.
The Roles, Functions and Objectives
The role of the organisation is to organize discussions and concepts with framework on problems Melanesians are facing within 100 – 1000 years from now and what we should do now in anticipation to those scenarios
The function of the organization is to mobilise and formulate shared views, perspectives, and understanding on our current existence and formulate our ambitions for future developments to maintain our Melanesian. Brotherhood to stay intact, united, sustained.
The objective of the body is to mobilise people’s power across Melanesian Archipelago to get united in determining our collective destiny as a people of the Blue Continent in response to Climate change and global warming!
The Nature
This movement should be a movement of the peoples, tribes, islands and clans and NOT NGOS because we NGOS are the ones that systematically disabling and destabilizing the Identity and power of our real Melanesia-hood and Melanesia-ness.
Closuring Remark
We have to stop colonial masters punish our collective destiny with death penalty based on colonial map and colonial interests, for the sake of serving our colonial masters. We have to stop this deadly nonsense. We have to come out clear and strong!
We as human beings, being created by God in His Own Image, should not wait and expect countries set up based on colonial map, namely West Papua, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu, Bougainville, Kanaky to become our protector. We have to get out from them.
We, as human beings have to stand up as human communities of tribes and islands, starting determining our future from now on. Hoping nation-states to do anything at all is a suicidal act.
Holy spirit speaks so my task is to speak it out. I am channeling what is coming!
The Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Tuvalu this week has ended in open division over climate change. Australia ensured its official communique watered down commitments to respond to climate change, gaining a hollow victory.
Traditionally, communiques capture the consensus reached at the meeting. In this case, the division on display between Australia and the Pacific meant the only commitment is to commission yet another report into what action needs to be taken.
The cost of Australia’s victory is likely to be great, as it questions the sincerity of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s commitment to “step up” engagement in the Pacific.
Australia’s stance on climate change has become untenable in the Pacific. The inability to meet Pacific Island expectations will erode Australia’s influence and leadership credentialsin the region, and provide opportunities for other countries to grow influence in the region.
An unprecedented show of dissent
When Morrison arrived in Tuvalu, he was met with an uncompromising mood. In fact, the text of an official communique was only finished after 12 hours of pointed negotiations.
While the “need for urgent, immediate actions on the threats and challenges of climate change”, is acknowledged, the Pacific was looking for action, not words.
Morrison was met with an uncompromising mood in by leaders in Tuvalu. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
What’s more, the document reaffirmed that “strong political leadership to advance climate change action” was needed, but leadership from Australia was sorely missing. It led Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga to note:
I think we can say we should’ve done more work for our people.
Presumably, he would have hoped Australia could be convinced to take more climate action.
In an unprecedented show of dissent, smaller Pacific Island countries produced the alternative Kainaki II Declaration. It captures the mood of the Pacific in relation to the existential threat posed by climate change, and the need to act decisively now to ensure their survival.
And it details the commitments needed to effectively address the threat of climate change. It’s clear nothing short of transformational change is needed to ensure their survival, and there is rising frustration in Australia’s repeated delays to take effective action.
Australia hasn’t endorsed the alternative declaration and Canberra has signalled once and for all that compromise on climate change is not possible. This is not what Pacific leaders hoped for and will come at a diplomatic cost to Australia.
Conflict had already begun brewing in the lead up to the Pacific Islands Forum. The Pacific Islands Development Forum – the brainchild of the Fijian government, which sought a forum to engage with Pacific Island Nations without the influence of Australia and New Zealand – released the the Nadi Bay Declaration in July this year.
This declaration called on coal producing countries like Australia to cease all production within a decade.
But it’s clear Canberra believes compromise of this sort on climate change would undermine Australia’s economic growth and this is the key stumbling block to Australia answering its Pacific critics with action.
As Sopoaga said to Morrison:
You are concerned about saving your economy in Australia […] I am concerned about saving my people in Tuvalu.
And a day before the meeting, Canberra announced half a billion dollars to tackle climate change in the region. But it received a lukewarm reception from the Pacific.
The message is clear: Canberra cannot buy off the Pacific. In part, this is because Pacific Island countries have new options, especially from China, which has offered Pacific island countries concessional loans.
As tension built at the Pacific Island Forum meeting, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters argued there was a double standard with respect to the treatment of China on climate change.
China is the world’s largest emitter of climate change gasses, but if there is a double standard it’s of Australia’s making.
Australia purports to be part of the Pacific family that can speak and act to protect the interests of Pacific Island countries in the face of China’s “insidious” attempts to gain influence through “debt trap” diplomacy. This is where unsustainable loans are offered with the aim of gaining political advantage.
But countering Chinese influence in the Pacific is Australia’s prime security interest, and is a secondary issue for the Pacific.
But unlike Australia, China has never claimed the moral high ground and provides an attractive alternative partner, so it will likely gain ground in the battle for influence in the Pacific.
Growing confidence among Pacific leaders has changed diplomatic dynamics forever. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
For the Pacific Island Forum itself, open dissent is a very un-Pacific outcome. Open dissent highlights the strains in the region’s premier intergovernmental organisation.
Australia and (to a lesser extent) New Zealand’s dominance has often been a source of criticism, but growing confidence among Pacific leaders has changed diplomatic dynamics forever.
This new pacific diplomacy has led Pacific leaders to more steadfastly identify their security interests. And for them, the need to respond to climate change is non-negotiable.
If winning the geopolitical contest with China in Pacific is Canberra’s priority, then far greater creativity will be needed as meeting the Pacific half way on climate change is a prerequisite for success.
The office of Nei Tabera Ni Kai (NTK), a film unit based in the town of Taborio, in the small island nation of Kiribati, is a small concrete building situated two metres above sea level, 30 metres from the lagoon on one side and 45 metres from the ocean on the other. Stacked under the louvred glass windows of one of its small rooms are 200 internal hard drives taken from computers over a period of 20 years. The office has no air conditioning, and the air is salty; there are regular electricity blackouts; and higher than normal wave surges, or “king tides”, threaten the town – and the whole southern end of the atoll, South Tarawa, on which it is located – more frequently than they used to.
Once a Kiribati household name, NTK has not worked on major projects for a couple of years. One of the co-founders, John Anderson, cameraman and editor, passed away in 2016. His long-time partner, producer, manager and scriptwriter Linda Uan, has been dealing with the loss and reflecting on the best way to preserve their shared legacy.
The independent film unit documented more than two decades of culture, history, creative arts practice, development, and social, heritage and environmental issues across the islands. In the absence of a national film agency or television media, NTK managed to piece together various sources of funding to work with government and communities to produce educational documentaries, feature films and “edutainment”. Their output had a significant impact on the scattered Kiribati population – people from other islands travelled to South Tarawa by boat or canoe just to pick up the latest VHS, and later DVD, of their productions.
In March 2019, Uan attended the Maoriland Film Festival in Otaki, New Zealand. During a discussion panel, she spoke passionately about NTK’s work over the years. She ended with a humble request for assistance with archiving, taking one of those rectangular hard drives containing raw footage from her handbag and unwrapping it from a lavalava (sarong), then holding it up for the audience to see. The group of New Zealand and international filmmakers gasped at the condition of the drive, and the prospective loss of decades of visual chronicles, exposed to the elements in Kiribati.Loading
All but one of the 33 islands in Kiribati are less than two metres above sea level. Large parts of the country are expected to be under water by 2050. From 2003 to 2016 Kiribati was led by President Anote Tong, who successfully raised global awareness of the climate change threats faced by his country. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn in 2017, Kiribati was described as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries.
Annual temperatures in South Tarawa have increased by roughly 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade since 1950, according to the conference’s briefing paper. This warming, coupled with increasingly ferocious tidal storms and coastal flooding, is destroying the island’s ecosystems.
Saltwater that floods the islands from storm surges devastates land and property, polluting reservoirs that capture and filter groundwater for consumption. Salt water also jeopardises resources such as coconuts, pandanus and breadfruit, which residents rely on for food and many other household needs.
In the Kiribati population, there has been a rise in waterborne diseases, among other climate-change-induced illnesses, including cholera and dengue fever. Warming oceans, combined with increased ocean acidification, disrupts sea life, which is the cornerstone of Kiribati identity and the country’s economy. Kiribati depends almost entirely on its fishing sector for food and revenue, but the catch potential is expected to decrease by 70 per cent by the 2050s.
Kiribati is one of 48 nations in the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of countries most under threat from global warming. These include Tuvalu, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa and the Marshall Islands.
Kiribati once chaired the forum, and under Tong was a vocal proponent for limiting the temperature rise from global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond this temperature, sea levels are expected to increase to a point that would make Kiribati uninhabitable. Despite global campaigns calling for “1.5 to stay alive”, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change seeks to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. This is devastating for most Pacific island countries.
Anote Tong was vocal about the need for Kiribati to face climate-induced migration “with dignity”. However, the current government, led by Taneti Mamau, rejects this vision of mass migration, instead emphasising local development. The government aims to develop and increase the land area on South Tarawa by about 100 acres, and on Kiritimati (also known as Christmas Island) by 767 acres. It also owns 22 square kilometres of land on Vanua Levu in Fiji, with potential for forestry, livestock farming and other activities to shore up its food and economic security as Kiribati farmland comes under threat.
Reality too much for many to fathom
The level of carbon now in the atmosphere is more than 415 parts per million. The last time the Earth experienced these levels was during the Pliocene Epoch, between 5.3 and 2.5 million years ago. Then, global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher, and the sea levels 25 metres higher. Pollution from climate change today is on track to push the Earth towards similar conditions. To many Australian voters, this reality is too much to fathom, presumed to be a hoax, or utterly unknown.
A sea wall in the village of Tebunginako at low tide.CREDIT:JUSTIN MCMANUS
Prime Minister Scott Morrison might support climate adaptation and mitigation programs in the Pacific through his “Pacific step-up”, but he does not support similar domestic policies, such as increased research on climate change or the introduction of a carbon price, and Australia has no renewable energy targets beyond 2030. It is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal but faces falling demand as its biggest customers – Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan and India – all shift towards cleaner energy. Burning coal is in Australia a bit like the right to bear arms in the United States: a freedom that causes major planetary harm, but the issue is severely politicised and many are not willing to imagine a future without it.
This protection of the mining industry is not new. For more than a century Australia has had a relationship with the South Pacific region that furthered its economic interests. Australian mining companies have been present in the Pacific since the beginning of the 20th century, wreaking havoc on ancient cultures and sustainable environmental practices while extracting phosphate as quickly as possible from places such as Nauru and Kiribati.
The value of phosphate, the superphosphate fertiliser it produced, and the growth effects it had on Australian farming production and exports were massive. In 1983 a monograph produced by the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies described phosphate as “the magic dust of Australian agriculture”. In the case of Banaba, an island that forms part of Kiribati, the mining infrastructure was left to rust and decay. People there live among the asbestos-riddled rubble, in a place that looks more like a post-apocalyptic lunarscape than a Pacific paradise.
When Peter Dutton made his flippant aside in 2015 in response to a quip by Tony Abbott about how islanders are not good at keeping to time (Dutton said, “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door”) Tony deBrum, the former foreign minister for the Marshall Islands, posted on Twitter, “Next time waves are battering my home & my grandkids are scared, I’ll ask Peter Dutton to come over, and we’ll see if he is still laughing.”
Former minister for the environment Melissa Price’s words to Tong were also offensive. When she was introduced to him in a Canberra restaurant, it was widely reported – and verified by others in the restaurant – that she said, “I know why you’re here. It is for the cash. For the Pacific it’s always about the cash. I have my chequebook here. How much do you want?”
That kind of attitude towards Pacific island leaders needs to change. Such leaders have been criticising the production and consumption of fossil fuels and their impacts on the environment for almost 30 years. The former Nauru ambassador to the United Nations, Marlene Moses, wrote in 2016, “For the people of small islands, understanding the importance of the ocean to human survival is as natural as breathing. If the ocean is healthy, we are healthy; if the future of the ocean is uncertain, so is ours.”
The Pacific islands may be smaller states demographically and geographically, but the sea in which they sit covers one-third of the planet’s surface area. Pacific leadership on climate change is necessary and inevitable.
Knowledge a source of resilience for 2000 years
Since 1997, Nei Tabera Ni Kai has produced more than 400 films in both English and the Kiribati language focused on Kiribati knowledge, lives, issues and communities. They have documented what residents call “te katei ni Kiribati” – the Kiribati way. Their work should be stored in a well-funded archive and maintained for posterity. The name of the unit comes from a female ancestral spirit belonging to Linda Uan’s clan, responsible for women’s health and success. Climate change threatens not only the lands of families and clans such as hers, but the spiritual and cultural spheres associated with these landscapes.
The knowledge inherent in these spheres has been the source of resilience for more than 2000 years in an oceanic environment with limited land, flora and fauna, allowing islanders not only to survive but to produce complex, creative societies.
Australia is now saturated with messages about the existential threat of climate change, but the impacts will cut across all dimensions of human existence – the social, the political, the cultural, the economic, the environmental, and everything else that shapes our identities and relationships.
Climate change is here today, not just in some distant future, and Pacific Islanders who cannot always crawl into air-conditioned, climate-controlled bubbles experience its effects on a daily basis. While the people of the Pacific are resilient and have survived centuries of upheaval, climate change is already at emergency levels in the region – representing some of the first and starkest signs of the greatest ecological threat to ever face humanity.
Katerina Teaiwa is an associate professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. This is an edited extract of her essay “No Distant Future: Climate Change as an Existential Threat” published in Australian Foreign Affairs 6on July 15.
Geneva (AFP) – Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine stressed Friday the need for dramatic climate action and international support to ensure her people are not left as “sitting ducks” when sea levels inevitably rise.
In an interview with AFP in Geneva, Heine detailed a range of projects underway aimed at helping prepare and adapt her far-flung country, made up of 1,156 low-lying islands, scattered over 29 coral atolls, to rapidly shifting realities brought on by climate change.
“We have to do something, because the only other option is to sit there and wait for the water to come,” she said.
Most of the Marshall Islands lie less than two metres (6.5 feet) above sea level, leaving the Pacific Ocean archipelago’s some 55,000 inhabitants “sitting ducks when it comes to sea level rise,” she said.
The Marshall Islands is among the countries most immediately threatened by unchecked climate change.
Heine lamented that many countries were not taking the threat against small island states seriously enough. She described Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords as “deeply disappointing”.
Faced with lacklustre efforts to slow warning, she said the Marshall Islands’ “survival depends on innovative approaches”, pointing for instance to ongoing discussions about possibly elevating some of the islands.
“In order for the Marshall Islands as a country and as a culture and as a people… to remain in the future, we need to make sure we have higher grounds,” she said.
Heine said the project, which is part of a national climate change adaptation plan due to be published next year, would obviously “cost a lot of money”.
The Marshall Islands has been lobbying the World Bank, the Green Climate Fund and others for a special designation for atoll nations that would give them easier access to grants and loans for climate adaptation projects.
The country itself is spending more to address the negative consequences of climate change already being felt and to prepare for future shifts, including through the building of sea walls around island communities.
The share of its gross domestic product dedicated to disaster risk management and preparedness has doubled from five to 10 percent over the past four years alone, Heine said.
– ‘Disaster’ –
But this may not be enough. The Marshall Islands is also preparing for the possibility that the territory could eventually be swallowed by the sea.
“We want to stay where we are, where we belong, but if it comes to that then we need to consider… strategies,” Heine said.
She pointed out that Marshall Islanders are granted visa-free travel to the United States, and many have already gone there to start fresh.
“If it looks like we won’t be able to save the Marshall Islands, than perhaps more people will take that option,” she said, adding that she would “hate to see that because that means the disappearance of the Marshall Islands as a country”.
“That to me would be a disaster.”
The country is also considering petitioning the UN to ensure that “borders can continue to remain where they are even though they are submerged under water”.
“Even if people relocate elsewhere, their ownership of a certain piece of the ocean would remain,” ensuring rights to fishing and other marine resources, she said.
“I think some kind of discussion along that line needs to start taking place,” she said.
– Nuclear ‘leakage’ –
At the same time, rising sea levels could also exacerbate the threat left by the Marshall Islands’ nuclear legacy.
The US, which detonated 67 bombs at the Enewetak and Bikini atolls between 1947 and 1958 as part of its nuclear test programme, built a dome-shaped structure on Runit island to store the radioactive debris.
Rising seas are now threatening to undermine the structural integrity of the thick concrete dome, which has already developed cracks.
The US energy department insists there is no danger, but the Marshall Islands wants the UN or another country to “help with an independent assessment of the leakage,” Heine said.
ACCORDING to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) “global climate change already has observable effects on the environment. Scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.’ (https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/)
It is very sad but a reality that the “rapidly changing climate patterns, increasing population growth and intensity and levels of uses of natural ecosystems affect the ability of systems to respond to change. PNG has already been buffeted by extreme weather and climate events such as those brought about by the El Nino in 1997/98 with further changes in temperatures and sea level rise predicted over the next 100 years.’ (https://www.adaptation-undp.org/explore/melanesia/papua-new-guinea?page=1)
A good example of the drastic effect of climate change can be seen in the village of Airara in the Collingwood Bay of Cape Nelson LLG, Northern. The sea level has risen and the heat waves are more intense forcing local villagers to move inland leaving behind their once beautiful beach shore village.
Seventy-eight-year-old Cecil Aburin, who was once a Southern Region post master with Post PNG, recalls his early days with a smirk on his face:
“Airara always had the cleanest and most beautiful shores in the whole of Collingwood Bay. I would always boast about my small village in the bay during my travels and work experience. But I can sadly say now, it’s not the same anymore.”
He said his people have now moved inland because the beachfront village is not conducive to normal life anymore. Aburin says that their catches at sea have decreased in volume, crops have decreased in size and diseases have increased both in humans and plants alike.
He adds that he would like to see a lot more involvement by organisations like Partners With Melanesians (PWM) who care about empowering local communities so that they are in control and able to make informed decisions regarding the use of their natural environment.
“I commend Partners With Melanesians in taking this stand with the people of Collingwood Bay to conserve our land. Collingwood Bay is beautiful and its time we realise that and preserve our land for our future generations. This will in a long run also help in mitigating the effects of climate change,”
Aburin says.
He says he’d like to be around when Collingwood Bay gets declared as a conservation or protected area. “I hope this day will come soon because I don’t know for how long I will be around. I have my fair share of stories to tell about Airara and I want my children and grandchildren too to also have their own stories to tell one day in beautiful Collingwood Bay.”
Partners With Melanesians recently had a joint planning meeting with representatives from the proposed Collingwood Bay Conservation Foundation (CWBCF) in Airara from April 26 to May 3.
The purpose of the planning meeting was to inform and educate the CWBCF representatives regarding the activities under PWM’s eight programmes which will be implemented in Collingwood Bay this year.
Also, the meeting was to formally introduce all programme coordinators of PWM to the people of Collingwood Bay and familiarise them with the environment in which they will be working in.
PWM envisions Melanesian societies to live in peace and harmony with their nature and their environment
The author is the Community Empowerment and Communications Coordinator for PWM.
And changed the alarmism from global cooling to global warming, and now climate change.
Al Gore former Vice President of the United States of America
Although his science is often seriously wrong, no one can deny that Al Gore has a flare for the dramatic. Speaking about climate change in an October 12 PBS interview, the former vice-president proclaimed, “We have a global emergency.” Referring to the most recent UN climate report, Gore claimed it showed that current global warming “could actually extend to an existential threat to human civilization on this planet as we know it.”
Al Gore’s overblown rhetoric makes no sense, of course. Yet his hyperbolic claims beg the question: How did this all start?
Back in the 1970s, media articles warning of imminent climate change problems began to appear regularly. TIME and Newsweek ran multiple cover stories asserting that oil companies and America’s capitalist life style were causing catastrophic damage to Earth’s climate. They claimed scientists were almost unanimous in their opinion that manmade climate change would reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
The April 28, 1975 Newsweek proposed solutions that even included outlawing internal combustion engines.
This sounds very similar to today’s climate change debate – except, in the 70s, the fear was manmade global cooling, not warming.
TIME magazine’s January 31, 1977 cover featured a story, “How to Survive The Coming Ice Age.” It included “facts” such as scientists predicting that Earth’s so-called average temperature could drop by 20 degrees Fahrenheit due to manmade global cooling. Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned readers that “the drop in temperature between 1945 and 1968 had taken us one sixth of the way to the next Ice Age temperature.”
Global cooling gained considerable traction with the general public. But then, instead of cooling as long predicted by manmade climate change advocates, the planet started warming again. Something had to be done to rescue the climate change agenda from utter disaster. Enter Al Gore.
Al Gore Sr., a powerful Senator from Tennessee, saw to it that his son was elected to the House of Representatives, serving from 1977 to 1985, then going on to the Senate from 1985 to 1993. Gore Junior’s primary issue was his conviction that the Earth would perish if we did not eliminate fossil fuels.
Gore advanced to Vice President under President Bill Clinton, where he was able to enact policies and direct funding to ensure that the climate change agenda became a top priority of the United States Government. Gore’s mission was boosted when Clinton gave him authority over the newly created President’s Council on Sustainable Development.
It will come as no surprise then that, when the Council’s Charter was revised on April 25, 1997, the “Scope of Activities” included the following directionto the Council:
Advise the President on domestic implementation of policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Council should not debate the science of global warming [emphasis added], but should instead focus on the implementation of national and local greenhouse gas reduction policies and activities, and adaptations in the U.S. economy and society that maximize environmental and social benefits, minimize economic impacts, and are consistent with U.S. international agreements. The Council should, at a minimum, identify and encourage potentially replicable examples of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across diverse sectors and levels of society.
Considering that the Council was tasked with advising the President “on matters involving sustainable development,” and alternative points of view on the science of climate change were effectively excluded, it was a foregone conclusion that the Clinton administration would go in the direction Gore wanted. Indeed, in their cover letter to the President accompanying their 1999 report, Advancing Prosperity, Opportunity and a Healthy Environment for the 21st Century, the Council stated: “Our report presents consensus recommendations on how America can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and take other steps to protect the climate.”
A cornerstone of Gore’s strategy was to ensure that all high-ranking government officials who had any involvement with funding policies relating to climate change were in line with his vision. These agencies included the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, Department of Education, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
An example of his power was shown when physicist Dr. William Happer, then Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy, testified before Congress in 1993 that scientific data did not support the hypothesis of manmade global warming. Gore saw to it that Happer was immediately fired. Fifteen years later, Happer quipped, “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly.”
Al Gore was also able to leverage his high visibility, his movie awards, his Nobel Prize, and his involvement in various carbon trading and other schemes into a personal fortune. When he ended his tenure as Vice President in 2001, his net worth was $2 million. By 2013, it exceeded $300 million.
Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, provided a series of graphic images showing the apocalyptic consequences that some had predicted if fossil fuels were allowed to continue warming the planet. Images included melting glaciers, dying polar bears, spreading diseases, coastal cities inundated by massive floods, cities wiped out by hurricanes and tornadoes, and food supplies exterminated by droughts.
This compelling propaganda played a major role in frightening an entire generation about the future, causing young people and many parents to feel guilty about the role that they and their country were supposedly having in destroying our beautiful planet.
Since then, Americans have been told constantly that they should feel irresponsible if they drive cars or use fossil fuel energy to heat their homes or power their businesses. A rapid, massive conversion away from coal, oil and natural gas to renewable energy sources such and wind and solar, we are told, is the only hope for saving the planet.
Now children are increasingly depressed about their future, thanks to the constant barrage of global warming propaganda that they receive at school. Indeed, they have become so brainwashed and cowed by their peers that they no longer dare to question any statement made about catastrophic climate change.
Yet, essentially everything in Gore’s climate change agenda is either wrong or highly misrepresented.
Now that he is President Donald Trump’s Senior Scientist for the National Security Council, Dr. Happer needs to show there is no “scientific consensus” on these issues, rekindle informed debate on climate and energy issues, and help bring hope, common sense and real science back into the discourse – to help end the dangerous mythology of dangerous manmade global warming.
Vanuatu was part of a recent regional conference on managing natural resources such as the ocean in a changing climate. By Anita Roberts
A conference has been held recently for experts in the mineral resource sector from the Pacific region to talk about how to prepare and mitigate the threats of climate change on natural resources.
The Coordinator of Pacific Risk Tools for Resilience (PARTneR) Project under the Ministry of Climate Change, Johnny Tarry Nimau, represented Vanuatu in the 3-day Pacific Islands Science, Technology and Resources Network Conference in Fiji.
Natural resources such as water, land, wind energy and the ocean are essential for humankind. Action is required to reduce the risk poses to these extractive sectors by climate change as a global issue.
Regional geoscientists and experts are working on strategies to mitigate the imminent threats of climate change from the geoscience perspective, PARTneR Coordinator Nimau said after the conference.
“The conference reflects on the linkages between geoscience, the ocean and natural resources,” Nimau conveyed in a statement.
“It provides an avenue for us to discuss sustainable management of our ocean and natural resources. It about how Pacific islands can mitigate for the damage imposed on their oceans and climate change impacts from the geoscience perspective.
“Sessions focussed on key areas such as ocean science, science of natural hazards and risks to Pacific communities including land use, energy and infrastructure development”.
‘Geo-Science Development in the Pacific Islands-Planning for 2030’ was the theme of the conference, which was supported by the Government of Fiji and the Geoscience Division of the Pacific Community (SPC).
PARTneR is managed by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and funded by the government of New Zealand, through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).
Five tiny Pacific islands have disappeared due to rising seas and erosion, a discovery thought to be the first scientific confirmation of the impact of climate change on coastlines in the Pacific, according to Australian researchers.
The submerged islands were part of the Solomon Islands, an archipelago that over the last two decades has seen annual sea levels rise as much as 10mm (0.4in), according to research published in the May issue of the online journal Environmental Research Letters.
The missing islands, ranging in size from 1 to 5 hectares (2.5-12.4 acres) were not inhabited by humans.
But six other islands had large swaths of land washed into the sea and on two of those, entire villages were destroyed and people forced to relocate, the researchers found.
One was Nuatambu island, home to 25 families, which has lost 11 houses and half its inhabitable area since 2011, the research said.
The study is the first that scientifically “confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people,” the researchers wrote in a separate commentary on an academic website.
The scientists used aerial and satellite images dating back to 1947 of 33 islands, as well as traditional knowledge and radiocarbon dating of trees for their findings.
The Solomon Islands, a nation made up of hundreds of islands and with a population of about 640,000, lies about 1,000 miles north-east of Australia.
The study raises questions about the role of government in relocation planning, said a Solomon Islands official.
Map of Nuatambu Island.
“This ultimately calls for support from development partners and international financial mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund,” Melchior Mataki, head of the Solomon Islands’ National Disaster Council, was quoted as saying in the commentary.
The Green Climate Fund, part of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was founded to help countries deal with climate change.
Ad hoc relocation has occurred on the islands, the study said. Several Nuatambu islanders moved to a neighbouring, higher volcanic island, the study said. Other people were forced to move from the island of Nararo.
Sirilo Sutaroti, 94, is among those who had to relocate from Nararo. He told researchers: “The sea has started to come inland, it forced us to move up to the hilltop and rebuild our village there away from the sea.”
New research factors in collapsing Antarctic ice sheet that could double the sea-level rise to two metres by 2100 if emissions are not cut
Antarctica’s snowfall was expected to keep the ice sheet in balance but it is less stable than previously thought. Photograph: Steve Mandel / Barcroft Media
Sea levels could rise far more rapidly than expected in coming decades, according to new research that reveals Antarctica’s vast ice cap is less stable than previously thought.
The UN’s climate science body had predicted up to a metre of sea level rise this century – but it did not anticipate any significant contribution from Antarctica, where increasing snowfall was expected to keep the ice sheet in balance.
According a study, published in the journal Nature, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets are expected to double sea-level rise to two metres by 2100, if carbon emissions are not cut.
Previously, only the passive melting of Antarctic ice by warmer air and seawater was considered but the new work added active processes, such as the disintegration of huge ice cliffs.
“This [doubling] could spell disaster for many low-lying cities,” said Prof Robert DeConto, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the work. He said that if global warming was not halted, the rate of sea-level rise would change from millimetres per year to centimetres a year. “At that point it becomes about retreat [from cities], not engineering of defences.”
As well as rising seas, climate change is also causing storms to become fiercer, forming a highly destructive combination for low-lying cities like New York, Mumbai and Guangzhou. Many coastal cities are growing fast as populations rise and analysis by World Bank and OECD staff has shown that global flood damage could cost them $1tn a year by 2050 unless action is taken.
The cities most at risk in richer nations include Miami, Boston and Nagoya, while cities in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast are among those most in danger in less wealthy countries.
“The bad news is that in the business-as-usual, high-emissions scenario, we end up with very, very high estimates of the contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise” by 2100, DeConto told the Guardian. But he said that if emissions were quickly slashed to zero, the rise in sea level from Antarctic ice could be reduced to almost nothing.
“This is the good news,” he said. “It is not too late and that is wonderful. But we can’t say we are 100% out of the woods.” Even if emissions are slashed, DeConto said, there remains a 10% chance that sea level will rise significantly.
Prof David Vaughan, at the British Antarctic Survey and not part of the research team, said: “The new model includes for the first time a projection of how in future, the Antarctic ice sheet may to lose ice through processes that today we only see occurring in Greenland.
“I have no doubt that on a century to millennia timescale, warming will make these processes significant in Antarctica and drive a very significant Antarctic contribution to sea level rise. The big question for me is, how soon could this all begin. I’m not sure, but these guys are definitely asking the right questions.”
Active physical processes are well-known ways of breaking up ice sheets but had not been included in complex 3D models of the Antarctic ice sheet before. The processes include water from melting on the surface of the ice sheet to flow down into crevasses and widen them further. “Meltwater can have a really deleterious effect,” said DeConto. “It’s an attack on the ice sheet from above as well as below.”
Today, he said, summer temperatures approach or just exceed freezing point around Antarctica: “It would not take much warming to see a pretty dramatic increase [in surface melting] and it would happen very quickly.”
The new models also included the loss of floating ice shelves from the coast of Antarctica, which currently hold back the ice on land. The break-up of ice shelves can also leave huge ice cliffs 1,000m high towering over the ocean, which then collapse under their own weight, pushing up sea level even further.
The scientists calibrated their model against geological records of events 125,000 years ago and 3m years ago, when the temperature was similar to today but sea level was much higher.
Sea-level rise is also driven by the expansion of water as it gets warmer and in January scientists suggested this factor had been significantly underestimated, adding further weight to concerns about future rises.
Research warns of the long timescale of climate change impacts unless urgent action is taken to cut emissions drastically
Huge sea-level rises caused by climate change will last far longer than the entire history of human civilisation to date, according to new research, unless the brief window of opportunity of the next few decades is used to cut carbon emissions drastically.
Even if global warming is capped at governments’ target of 2C – which is already seen as difficult – 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged.
“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years,” said Prof Peter Clark, at Oregon State University in the US and who led the new work. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”
“The long-term view sends the chilling message of what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era,” said Prof Thomas Stocker, at the University of Bern, Switzerland and also part of the research team. “It will commit us to massive adaptation efforts so that for many, dislocation and migration becomes the only option.”
The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, notes most research looks at the impacts of global warming by 2100 and so misses one of the biggest consequences for civilisation – the long-term melting of polar ice caps and sea-level rise.
This is because the great ice sheets take thousand of years to react fully to higher temperatures. The researchers say this long-term view raises moral questions about the kind of environment being passed down to future generations.
The research shows that even with climate change limited to 2C by tough emissions cuts, sea level would rise by 25 metres over the next 2,000 years or so and remain there for at least 10,000 years – twice as long as human history. If today’s burning of coal, oil and gas is not curbed, the sea would rise by 50m, completely changing the map of the world.
“We can’t keep building seawalls that are 25m high,” said Clark. “Entire populations of cities will eventually have to move.”
By far the greatest contributor to the sea level rise – about 80% – would be the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Another new study in Nature Climate Changepublished on Monday reveals that some large Antarctic ice sheets are dangerously close to losing the sea ice shelves that hold back their flow into the ocean.
Huge floating sea ice shelves around Antarctica provide buttresses for the glaciers and ice sheets on the continent. But when they are lost to melting, as happened the with Larsen B shelf in 2002, the speed of flow into the ocean can increase eightfold.
Johannes Fürst, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany and colleagues, calculated that just 5% of the ice shelf in the Bellingshausen Sea and 7% in the Amundsen Sea can be lost before their buttressing effect vanishes. “This is worrying because it is in these regions that we have observed the highest rates of ice-shelf thinning over the past two decades,” he said.
Avoiding the long-term swamping of many of the world’s greatest cities is already difficult, given the amount carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere. “Sea-level rise is already baked into the system,” said Prof Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.
However, the rise could be reduced and delayed if carbon is removed from the atmosphere in the future, he said: “If you are very optimistic and think we will be in the position by 2050 or 2070 to have a global scale carbon removal scheme – which sounds very science fiction – you could pump down CO2 levels. But there is no indication that this is technically possible.” A further difficulty is the large amount of heat and CO2 already stored in the oceans.
Prof Stocker said: “The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids the [worst] outcomes and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt.”
The researchers argue that a new industrial revolution is required to deliver a global energy system that emits no carbon at all. They conclude: “The success of the [UN climate summit in] Paris meeting, and of every future meeting, must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how they will lead ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.”
“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond,” said Prof Daniel Schrag, at Harvard University in the US. “We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing.
