How I Sank the Maldives
Climate Change hysteria has long since passed the point of parody, as I think this tale shows.
It follows a story - widely reported even in the liberal MSM, amazingly - that the Times Atlas of the World has greatly exaggerated the extent of recent ice loss in Greenland.
The clear implication is that this once-distinguished publication has been hijacked by climate alarmists more interested in spreading the gospel about the perils of "Man-Made Global Warming" than in old fashioned irrelevances like accuracy, physical geography or cartography.
So I wrote a spoof blog post suggesting that in its next edition the Times Atlas intends to take its missionary campaign a step further - omitting the Maldives, Tuvalu, Manhattan and parts of Bangladesh in order to illustrate the perils of rising sea-levels caused by "Climate Change."
I even found a tame invented expert:
"All right, it may not be strictly geographically accurate to say the Maldives and Tuvalu will definitely have disappeared in about ten years time when our next edition appears," said Times Atlas spokesman David Rose. "But did you see that picture of the Maldives cabinet holding a meeting underwater? If the Maldives government says the Maldives are drowning, they must be drowning. And frankly I think it's despicable, all those deniers who are saying it was just a publicity stunt, cooked up by green activist Mark Lynas, to blackmail the international community into giving the Maldives more aid money while simultaneously trying to lure green Trustafarians to come and spend £1500 a night in houses on stilts with gold-plated organic recyclable eco-toilets made of rare earth minerals from China. Why would a government lie about something as serious as climate change?"
Next thing I knew, my parody was being reported by the Maldives news agency as if it were true.
This is the big problem with Climate Change alarmism. So many of its extravagant claims are reported unchallenged by a complacent media quoting "experts" - whose competence or bias are never called in to question - that it's no wonder the Maldives news agency couldn't tell my spoof version from the real thing.
It ought to be funny but it's not, it's depressing. Like the (entirely unendangered) polar bear, the "sinking Maldives" have been adopted as one of the poster children of the environmental movement, endlessly cited to justify all the taxation and regulation being imposed on us in the name of 'combating climate change.'
But as the world's greatest sea-level expert Nils-Axel Morner tells us, the Maldives are not sinking.
And despite its government's hysterical demands for more international action (ie more aid money; more publicity) to be taken to save it, even the Maldives themselves must on some level be perfectly aware that it's all a scam.
If they weren't why would they be spending millions expanding their airport?
Unless, perhaps, it's to cope with the ark-like evacuation when the Great Deluge comes.
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Comments :
Feb '11
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
And what of East Anglia, the Thames estuary, and Holland? I mean, why just scare the gullible in the Indian Ocean? Much more fun to do it closer to home.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Well, I think for the same reason the Eco Nuts focus on the polar bear rather than the snail darter these days. East Anglia and the Thames just don't have the same glamor.
Dec '10
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Holland is already underwater, if the kid takes his finger out of the dyke.
Nov '10
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Forget AGW: what’s Al Gore got to say about wind-turbine-sourced free roton emissions? Notice all the tornadoes this past summer? Direct correlation. Yet federal roton-emission standards are tied up in committee hearings.
From Wikipedia:
. . . the science remains sketchy, occupying the no-man’s-land between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. In basic terms, a free roton is a quantum –a packet—of angular momentum, released from any unshielded rotating mass (a barber pole; a merry-go-round). Nearby ungrounded objects can absorb these until a tipping point –the Spinner Threshold*—is crossed. Free rotons are mostly absorbed by the circumambient air, resulting in wind vortices of varying size. Effects on exposed human subjects were first observed in Holland (for obvious reasons) and can range from dizziness to “augering”.
*Named for James Spinner 1881-1919, who made the first measurements of free rotons. It is believed that Spinner himself succumbed to a fatal dosage (>100 whirlies) while conducting experiments with a ceiling fan, causing him to auger through the floor of his home in Devonshire. His body was never recovered.
Hey, if Al Gore's allowed to make stuff up, then so am I.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Wow, they didn't catch on that the post was a spoof after the third paragraph?
How very sad.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the whole AGW thing is a racket...some colossal money laundering scheme, whereby players profit not just by distributing and receiving foreign aid, but also by providing justification for all of these loser "green" companies, and carbon credit companies that end up with enormous loans and special treatment from the federal government.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Whaat? How can you say such things Diane? You're suggesting - what - that Solyndra was some kind of fraud against the taxpayer? This is the President of the USA we're talking about here. He'd never get involved in such shenanigans!
Mar '11
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Diane, its a racket with a very interesting religious component.
Mar '11
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Neither would an esteemed ex-VP and some-say President (who also invented the Internets). The fact that he has invested in carbon credit companies is entirely coincidental.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Give Me Liberty
Diane, its a racket with a very interesting religious component. · Sep 21 at 10:45am
It's just the little people who are conned into thinking AGW is legitimate that are susceptible to the religious zealotry. I don't believe that the big players really buy what they're selling everyone else. Just speculation there. Go ahead and report me to Attack Watch.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
May I simply say, James, that I just adore having you with us on Ricochet?
Now that you've sunk the Maldives, btw, may I ask your plans for the Seychelles?
Dec '10
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
James Delingpole: ...
So I wrote a spoof blog post suggesting that in its next edition the Times Atlas intends to take its missionary campaign a step further - omitting the Maldives, Tuvalu, Manhattan and parts of Bangladesh in order to illustrate the perils of rising sea-levels caused by "Climate Change."
Funny, I read this, "... that in its next edition the Times Atlantis intends..."
I think it's fabulous, James. There's nothing as effective as deflecting scorn and mockery back on the Left, even if it's unintentional on your part, or self-inflicted on the Left's part. I'm pretty sure there's enough innate common sense remaining in the people to see through this stuff. We just have to pry the levers of power out of the hands of leftists.
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
I would drop everything I'm doing right now to return to university for a degree in Sinking Islands Studies.
I think I'd do my dissertation on this: "Problematizing the Isle: Sex and Gender Politics and Poetics in the Age of Rising Waters."
I await my MacArthur Grant.
Mar '11
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
Peter Robinson: May I simply say, James, that I just adore having you with us on Ricochet?
Now that you've sunk the Maldives, btw, may I ask your plans for the Seychelles? · Sep 21 at 10:55am
To sell them by the seashore?
Apr '11
Re: How I Sank the Maldives
I watch a fair number of Nature Program's with my 11 and 9 year old junior scientists. And we read a fair number of science articles. WHAT DRIVES ME CRAZY is that almost every article about animals or a natural wonder has a line or two about the horrible effects global warming will have on the animal or park or natural wonder. Luckily, my 5th grade physicists maintain proper skepticism about AGW.
So "Maldives" showed up on the news agency's Google news alert and they saw a bunch of nonsense about global warming and figured it made about as much sense as the rest of the stuff written about their islands.