More to Tuvalu than the alarmists claimed

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"HOW embarrassing. Global warming worriers have gone from warning Tuvalu will drown to wishing it damn well had.But look at it now. Not drowning, but waving. And, er ... growing too? You remember Tuvalu, of course, even if you’ve never figured quite where it was.For years this glittering string of atolls has been shoved in your face as the poster islands of the global warming faith - this Eden we were killing with our Western sin.How often we were told it could be the first Pacific nation to be swallowed by the rising seas caused by our evil gases.In fact, warned Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth, so dire was this danger that “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”.Of course, this claim was as phony as so many Gore made in a film that was honoured with an Oscar, endorsed as accurate by the CSIRO and shown with reverence in every school in the country.As a British judge later ruled, there was no evidence of climate refugees from the Pacific having to be evacuated to New Zealand or anywhere else to escape rising seas.But truth has counted for dangerously little in this debate, and warmists told one Tuvaluan tale after another of an endangered Polynesian paradise that grew steadily more mythical. ....And now we know that Tuvalu, far from drowning, is rising from the seas.It was already clear from the Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that sea levels in the region were rising only microscopically, much as they’d done for centuries before the invention of the motor car or the light bulb.But now New Scientist reports that however fast the seas are rising, Tuvalu and many other low-lying Pacific islands are so far rising even faster, thanks to coral debris, coral growth, land reclamation and deposits of sediment. Some have grown by as much as a third. Auckland University’s Associate Prof Paul Kench, one of the two authors of the study, said he compared historical pictures from the past 60 years to satellite images of 27 Pacific islands.“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, (grown) larger,” he said.(In fact, the real figure is an even more comforting 86 per cent.) ..."