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It would be cool story if a shark attacks them.
Island nation of Maldives to hold underwater Cabinet meeting to show climate change threat
Bharatha Mallawarachi, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Government ministers in scuba gear prepared Friday to hold an underwater meeting of the Maldives' Cabinet to highlight the threat global warming poses to the lowest-lying nation on earth.
The Maldives' president will lead Saturday's meeting around a table on the sea floor - 20 feet (6 metres) below the surface - and ministers will communicate using white boards and hand signals.
President Mohammed Nasheed has emerged as a key, and colorful, voice on climate change amid fears that rising ocean levels could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet (2.1 metres) above sea level.
Nasheed is also a certified diver, while other ministers have had to take diving lessons in recent weeks.
"None of the ministers have ever been diving before, except the defence minister, and all of them are very enthusiastic," Zoona Naseem, president of Divers Association Maldives, said in a statement from the president's office.
Nasheed has already announced plans for a fund to buy a new homeland for his people if the 1,192 low-lying coral islands are submerged. He has promised to make the Maldives, with a population of 350,000, the world's first carbon-neutral nation within a decade.
The underwater Cabinet plans to sign a do ent calling on all countries to cut down their carbon dioxide emissions ahead of a major U.N. climate change conference in December in Copenhagen, where countries will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are blamed for causing global warming by trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere.
Wealthy nations want broad emissions cuts from all countries, while poorer ones say industrialized countries should carry most of the burden.
On Friday, the Maldives ministers went diving for rehearsals off the island of Girifushi, about 20 minutes by speedboat from the capital, Male, said Aminath Shauna, an official from the president's office.
Three of the 14 ministers will miss the underwater meeting because two were not given medical permission and another is abroad, Shauna said.
It would be cool story if a shark attacks them.
Any note on HOW MUCH of their islands have been swamped to this point?
This is Roflicious - Pure absurdity
The irony is, the Maldives are atols. Atols are volcanic islands that (wait for it) ---- SINK!
That sounds superficially conclusive, but you actually ducked 101's question.
The mere fact of geological subsidence does not necessarily moot rising seas.
Have you compared the rates of erosion/subsidence and the rate of rising seas, so as to verify your smugness about the sea-level anxiety the Maldives seems to be projecting? The elevation of the land mass there seldom rises above 6 ft..
Are they getting swamped?
http://features.csmonitor.com/enviro...-new-homeland/According to the CIA World Factbook, some 80 percent of the 1,192 coral islets that make up the Maldives are one meter or less above sea level, making it the world’s lowest country. The UN climate panel predicts that, unless greenhouse emissions are curbed, sea levels could rise by 25 to 58 centimeters by the end of the century. More recent studies, such as this one published in the journal Science, sharply increase the projected sea level rise, to as high as two meters.
If this happens, the Maldives would be uninhabitable. But Maldivians wouldn’t be the first population displaced by global warming.
That distinction probably belongs to the half million residents of Bangladesh’s Bhola Island whose homes were swallowed in 1995 by rising sea levels. In 2005, the 1,600 residents of Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands began evacuation, as the advancing sea contunued to destroy gardens, sink homes, and contaminate freshwater supplies. Also that year, 100 residents of Vanuatu’s island of Tegua had to be evacuated as their homes became permanently flooded.
Bloggy stuff:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/1...ea-level-rise/
Proceedings of the Small States Conference on Sea Level Rise:
The possible responses to inundation and flooding fall roughly into three categories: abandoning islands, holding back the sea with dikes, and building the island upward.http://papers.risingsea.net/Maldives..._States_3.htmlIn my view, the most generally appropriate means of protecting the nation will be to gradually elevate the islands. This will require a lot of sand and coral, but it would enable the islands to retain storage capacity for groundwater, and not substantially change the character of the islands. Moreover, it would make use of the existing capacity for removing coral from the sea; simply shifting the use from the creation of land to the maintenance of land.
it's a shame many smart people and scientist are getting lumped together with tin foil hat wearing 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Creationists just because they find evidence of rapid decay of our ice caps.
Captain Sea Level's links.
In an interview with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner (head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project – he has been studying the sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years) by EIR (Argentine Foundation for a Scientific Ecology) [http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen7/MornerEng.html] he talked about the IPCC misrepresentation of sea level data: “Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC's] publications,... was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge... It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” ... I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it's not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don't say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend! That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. ... So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations
Wonder Twin Powers -- ACTIVATE!
Form of: A giant Ice Vagina!
To me, climate change is the norm -- nothing exceptional.
Seas have been rising and ice has been melting before the invention of the automobile. Another ice age will eventually come and the trends will reverse. And when we get out of that ice age, seas will rice and glaciers will retreat yet again. It's cyclical.
Not much land there. Similar to most atolls.
It seems certain that the islands of Maldives were first settled by Aryan immigrants who are believed to have colonised Sri Lanka at the same time, (around 500 BC). Further migration from South India, as well as Sri Lanka, occurred. The latest archaeological findings suggest the islands were inhabited as early as 1500 BC. Around 947 AD, recorded contact with the outside world began with the first Arab traveller.
From the wiki:Islam in Maldives was introduced in 1153 and has remained dominant since, being the smallest predominantly Muslim nation in the world.
The Maldives is the smallest Asian country in both population and area; With an average ground level of 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) above sea level, it is the lowest country on the planet. [6] It is also the country with the lowest highest point in the world, at 2.3 metres (7 ft 7 in)
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