i love watching while we destroy this pretty little planet, not to mention i LOVE the mild winters

http://news.independent.co.uk/environme ... 099971.ece

Disappearing World: Global Warming Claims Tropical Island
By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent UK

Sunday 24 December 2006

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human Cost of Global Warming: Rising Seas Will Soon Make 70,000 People Homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

I'm just saying, there are other reasons why islands rise and fall in the seas, especially when they are basically big sandbars in the deltas of major rivers or atolls in volcanic regions.

Ask the question, if this is due to global warming, why is this effect not being seen uniformly around all of the coasts of teh world? More importantly, why is it happening more acutely in the places reoported in this story?

good point, but i tend to lean towards the side of extensive research on this subject by multitudes of experts, which continues to overwhelmingly point to rising sea levels caused by global warming as fact.

But why is it rising by inches in one place, and feet in others?

good question

i guess the more below sea level you are the more water you are gonna get?

So I get it. The flooding in New Orleans wasn't because the dikes broke and vast parts of New Orleans was built below sea level. It was due to rising ocean levels in that one part of the world. Thanks, it's all so much clearer for me now.

People should have paid attention to the Cost' when they had the chance.....

Two theories:

1. It isn't rising significantly further in different places. They just aren't as far above sea, so more land is lost. This attributes to people refer to the sea as rising "feet" rather than inches.

2. I know the influence of the moon on tides is much more significant in some places than others. Places around the equater are especially susceptible. Maybe that's related/connected to this in some way.

i misread/understood the question

This would assume that people (10,000 people) have been living on an island that is entirely less than a foot above extreme high tide for many years. Personally, I think it is more likely that the land itself has sunk, for a number of reasons, some of which may be global warming related.


That's a good thought. I've neever fully understood why tides are more extreme in some places than others. But teh most extreme tides are in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, and that's not near the equator at all.

The chilling truth about any kind of politically-motivated science:

"Global warming is not a threat" does not make very good news, nor does it warrant any government funding. You do the math.

the opposite has been the reality. governments (at least mine under this current administration) have been dismissing global warming or stating "they need new science" while at the same time the scientific community and experts on this matetr have been saying blatantly for years now that global warming is real, and rising seas are 1 reaction to this wearming process.

so i dont buy that this is a conspiracy to scare people and drum up funding. as a matter of fact this administartion recently has tried to quiet, or censor, what folks at NASA have been trying to say about this problem.

This island is gone because God hated the inhabitants.

DUH!!!

You missed my point. It's not about whether the government is offering up money or not. In a more general sense, scientists are not going to get funding unless they come up with something new or different, and alarmism is a great way to mask any failure to achieve groundbreaking results. Remember those two scientists in Utah who achieved cold fusion? Well, they wouldn't have been able to get a company to pay them if they said they weren't able to achieve cold fusion.

If this article demonstrates anything, it is that scientists are every bit as biased as any of us are. In fact, their livelihood depends on their obtaining certain results, so their impartiality might be even more questionable. Which is why they would draw the conclusion that global warning is at fault here. If ocean levels were really an issue, they wouldn't need a low-lying island to prove their point; they could measure sea levels anywhere.

its almost the new year, and we havent had much if any snow. if this is the result of global warming, then i am all for it

um, they have been doing that for quite some time now

this article was not a scientfic research study to prove or disprove anything. it is simply covering a pretty interesting story, which appears to be happening because of rising sea leavels caused by global warming.

It really just an awful one sided uninforming piece. Only the most uncritical thinker would read this and say. "Golly, I bet that's true."