Are the Fiji Islands the "canary in the coal mine" clearly indicating the human side of climate change?

Question

"I think they (rich countries) know what we need. I think they know what they should do to reduce the emissions," he said.
"Australia has done that now. They ratified the protocol," he said.
Kiribati President Anote Tong showed the conference video footage of what he called the consequences of rising water levels for his island nation, including intensifying floods and storms and greater salt levels in the groundwater.
He said 25 to 50 percent of urban areas in a southern region of his country was under threat from rising sea levels, while 50 to 80 percent of villages risked being submerged in the same region.
"This is typical of what's happening now," he warned.
An official from Tuvalu called for technological help to secure safer water and better sanitation, while Fiji's finance minister asked for more loans to help deal with the effects of rising water levels.

"I appeal particularly to financing institutions to consider soft-loan options for small island nations with vulnerable economies," Fijian Finance Minister Mahendra Chaudhry said.
"There are other competing demands on government financing which come from the social sector," he said.
Asia-Pacific leaders agreed at the end of the two-day meeting to "exhort the Bali Conference to take into account" problems such as the melting of snowcaps and glaciers in the Himalayas and rising sea levels, a statement said.
Prince Willem Alexander of The Netherlands, who chairs the UN International Year of Sanitation next year, called on policymakers to show more commitment.
"Everyone has a right to sanitation," the heir to the Dutch throne said.
"Our main dilemma is that we, you and I, policymakers and opinion formers, are not confronted with the impact of inadequate sanitation," he said.
"Consequently it takes a lot of effort to generate political will and financial commitment for something that

something that doesn't directly affect us," he said.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ji6GC4cc8j5J79-Eoq1xsZwnfUTw

How pathetic that you didn't even read the article, or that you didn't even get the point of the article.

Not that that is a surprise or anything.

Flyboy- Take your spam elsewhere. Climate change is not the forum for political attack.

Answer 1

Actually, what's going on in the world is a chorus of canaries, and the Fiji Islands are only one of many. Among scientists this is perhaps a louder bird:

"Ice is the canary in the coal mine of global warming."

Britain's chief scientist David King

Answer 2

Kyoto is an exceptionally flawed attempt. I wholeheartedly consider the concepts yet to truly dodge the destiny the place China and India often is the main individuals to CO2 ( China is largely equivalent to the U. S. innovations-blowing now )and different emissions is a ridiculous attempt. Kyoto could desire to easily be a commencing factor and we could desire to continually in the present day start up Kyoto II which honestly takes into consideration destiny advancements. human beings in the U. S. are truly getting right into a "eco-friendly" innovations set and it will improve from right here, we choose some legislative help to truly get the ball rolling inspite of out signing onto Kyoto as that's now, yet I do have faith we choose a worldwide huge .

Answer 3

I posted a comment the other day, something like, "This is one of my favorite things about the Yahoo Answers board, that someone can post a FACT which anybody can look up, google, choose their own source and read about, and yet people will STILL come on and deny those facts! It is delicious!"

That applies here as well.

All you have done is post an article discussing the FACTS of what is happening if the Fiji Islands right now... like the salt seeping into the groundwater supply, the sanitation issues, etc.

And what do the bushlickers do?

Deny.

It really is quite funny. In a disturbing sort of way.

Answer 4

If the people of Fiji could learn how to live together peacefully, they could be a tourist paradise like Tahiti or Hawaii, instead of being somewhere tourists are afraid to go in case they get shot at, then they would be a rich country instead of a poor one and they wouldn't need to go begging at the UN.

(edit) The government of Fiji has never once asked for a reduction in emissions. They ask for the one and only thing which is there one and only contribution to the conference - how much money can we have.

As the sea level is rising at about 3mm per year (or 30% of the rate it was rising 10000 years ago). If it continues at this rate it will rise about 30cm in 100 years. Is that what all the fuss is about?

Answer 5

Yes - Clearly the President has it right. "Global warming" is the goal of taking more money from those (rich) countries.

Answer 6

The Science of Gore's Nobel
What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?

BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR. (Wall Street Journal Online)
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet.

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?

It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.
Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.

Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the "world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error." Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible.

Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell's beloved Detroit?

Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: "One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted."

Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.

Now let's suppose a most improbable, rhapsodic lobbying success for Mr. Gore, Mr. Khosla and folks on their side of the table--say, a government mandate to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative. This would represent a monumental, $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. The impact on global carbon emissions? Four percent--less than China's predicted emissions growth over the next three or four years.

Don't doubt that this is precisely the chasm that keeps Mr. Gore from running for president. He could neither win the office nor govern on the basis of imposing the kinds of costs supposedly necessary to deal with an impending "climate crisis." Yet his credibility would become laughable if he failed to insist on such costs. How much more practical, then, to cash in on the crowd-pleasing role of angry prophet, without having to take responsibility for policies that the public will eventually discover to be fraudulent.

Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.

No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources.

Mr. Gore would have to find a new job.