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Rising Seas Not Resulting in Disappearing Islands

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5 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

A spate of recent articles acknowledges a fact that Climate Realism has long discussed. Most island nations, rather than sinking beneath the waves as seas rise amid modest warming, as predicted by climate alarmists and island profiteers, are, in fact growing.

Writing for The Pipeline, Buck Throckmorton thoroughly debunks claims that recent collapses of houses built on the shores of barrier islands in North Carolina were caused by climate change:

[B]arrier islands … are impermanent deposits of sand, which reshape, move, merge, appear, and disappear due to tides, winds, and storms.

The movement of barrier islands is not due to rising sea levels, it is due to a naturally occurring force called “longshore drift.” Where there are man-made efforts to stabilize barrier islands with jetties and sea walls, this produces other impacts on currents that cause erosion in some waterfront areas and new sand deposits in others. Beach houses in the Outer Banks are not being lost due to rising sea levels, they are being lost due to shifting sands.

Throckmorton also pointed to the disappearance of Tucker’s Island, off the coast of New Jersey, which completely disappeared due to “long-shore drift,” not rising seas.

NOAA describes the impact of long-shore drift, thusly:

Longshore drift may also create or destroy entire barrier islands along a shoreline. A barrier island is a long offshore deposit of sand situated parallel to the coast. As longshore drifts deposit, remove, and redeposit sand, barrier islands constantly change.

Semi-permanent, shifting barrier islands are not the only types of islands not being destroyed by climate change-induced rising seas. Even  The New York Times  (NYT) was recently forced by reality to admit that coral atolls, long the poster child of rising seas claiming nations, have been expanding and adding land amidst the Earth’s slight recent warming.

As recently as April 2024, with a story titled “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands,“ the NYT was still pushing the lie that rising seas threaten dozens of island nations, consisting of hundreds of small coral atolls, with extinction. Reality forced the NYT to reverse itself in the space of just three months. The author of a late June article, “A Surprising Climate Find,” wrote:

Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.

The problem with this narrative is that the fact of growing islands during the recent period of climate change is not new news. In fact, as my colleague Linnea Lueken noted in a recent piece, the study the NYT references was published in 2018, six years ago. It found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting.

Indeed, geological understanding of coral atoll growth and demise is not newly discovered.

“Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels,” Lueken points out. “Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.”

Repeated studies show that what is true of the Maldives, growth amid rising seas, is equally true of the islands that make up Tuvalu and Kiribati, and across the island chains of Micronesia. One well-cited study from 2015 reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown, in recent decades.

Oceans, oceans everywhere, and nowhere can be found the much-bemoaned decline in island nations hyped be climate hucksters with regularity. When even the NYT is forced to admit this truth, you know the climate alarm narrative is in trouble.

Sources: The Pipeline;  The New York Times;  Climate Realism

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Alberta

Alberta’s carbon diet – how to lose megatonnes in just three short decades

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Carl Marcotte, Candu Energy, Scott Henuset, Energy Alberta, and William McLeod

From Resource Works

By

Solving emissions problem is turning Alberta into a clean-tech powerhouse.

While oil, gas and pipelines took up a lot of oxygen at last week’s Global Energy Canada Show in Calgary, there was also a considerable focus on clean energy, clean-tech and decarbonization.

Alberta’s very survival in a decarbonizing world depends on innovation, best practices and regulations that will allow it to continue to produce oil and gas while trying to meet net zero targets that, like a mirage, appear to move further away the closer we get to them. Necessity being the mother of invention, Wild Rose Country has become rather inventive. It has become something of a clean-tech powerhouse and, as a result, has made some notable progress in its emissions intensity. Alberta’s industrial carbon tax, in place since 2007, and which hit $95 per tonne in 2025, has been used to fund emissions abatement technology and innovation through the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program.

According to the Government of Alberta, the province has, to date, achieved:

  • an 8.7% decline in overall emissions since 2015;
  • a 52% decline in methane emissions since 2014;
  • a 26% decline in oil sands emissions intensity since 2012; and
  • 15 million tonnes of CO2 sequestered through carbon capture and storage.

The Pembina Institute, it is worth noting, has taken issue with some of Alberta’s reporting. Based on the federal National Inventory Report, Alberta’s methane emissions have declined by 35% between 2014 and 2023, not 52%.

Information sessions at last week’s conference covered topics like geothermal energy, lithium extraction, methane emissions detection and reduction technology, low-carbon hydrogen production and use, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power. Alberta’s contributions to the energy transition and decarbonization is, I think, a bit of an untold story.

In the case of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), it’s a story that some environmentalists don’t want to hear, and don’t want anyone else to hear. In 2023, Greenpeace and two other environmental NGOs filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau against the Pathways Alliance, saying its claims of potential emissions reduction through CCUS constituted greenwashing. The Trudeau government responded with an anti-greenwashing bill — C-59 — that puts companies at risk of fines for making claims on emission reductions that are not backed by “adequate and proper” testing and evidence. Basically, companies will need to show their homework before making claims on climate benefits or risk hefty fines.”Some of the things that I’ve said would be illegal for my companies to say under the existing law because it would be called greenwashing,” Premier Danielle Smith said at last week ‘s conference. Green fundamentalists don’t want to hear about climate benefits, if it involves things like carbon capture, which they view as extending the lifetime of fossil fuels. Maybe they didn’t get the memo from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 3, which last year pronounced in a special report that carbon sequestration is “unavoidable if net zero CO2 or GHG emissions are to be achieved.”

Alberta’s oil and gas industry understands full well there is a big target on their backs: the oil sands. This energy intensive form of extracting oil generated 86.5 million million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2023, according to the Alberta government. That accounts for 33% of Alberta’s total GHG emissions, and is getting perilously close to the federal government’s emission’s cap for oil and gas.

Government of Alberta
Government of Alberta

Alberta ingenuity and innovation in extracting oil from sand led Canada to become the world’s fourth largest oil producer, with huge economic benefits for Canada. Alberta is now applying that ingenuity to try to shrink its GHG profile. Alberta has had some of the largest emissions reductions in the power generation sector in Canada recently, thanks to the phasing out of coal power.

Last year, it retired its last coal power plant, meaning the province reached its goal of phasing out coal six years ahead of federal and provincial targets of 2030. As a result, emissions from Alberta’s electricity sector declined 54% between 2015 and 2023, according to the Alberta government. It accomplished this by investing in wind and solar power, backed by firm natural gas power. Alberta now has about twice the amount of installed wind power as B.C. Alberta also reached methane emission reduction targets ahead of schedule. The Alberta government reports a 52% decline in methane intensity between 2014 and 2023, exceeding the target of a 45% decrease by 2025.

According to a recent S&P Global report, the GHG intensity of Alberta’s oil sands has declined 23% since 2009. And since 2019, S&P reports, the pace of oil sands emissions growth has slowed, with a 3% increase in emissions since 2019, despite a 9% growth in oil and gas production. Alberta’s challenge is that, as long as it plans to increase oil and gas production — and it does — reducing its emissions is like draining a bathtub while the faucet is still on. While emissions intensity may go down, absolute emissions could still grow with production growth, and Danielle Smith would like to see Alberta’s oil production double. So, some pretty big gains will be needed if Alberta is to achieve the dual goal of increasing oil production while trying to bring its emissions intensity down to zero by 2050. The only way to do that is through large-scale CCUS, and Alberta has become a global leader in its deployment. Thanks to CCUS, Alberta is poised to become a leading producer of blue hydrogen, ammonia and other “net-zero chemicals.” Through CCUS initiatives like the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and the Shell Quest CCS project, Alberta has already sequestered 13.5 million tonnes of CO2, according to Emissions Reduction Alberta.

The Pathways Alliance — a consortium of Alberta’s biggest oil producers — propose a $10 billion to $20 billion investment that includes a large scale-up of CCUS, to decarbonize oil sands production and Alberta’s petrochemical industry. According to Natural Resources Canada, the estimated sequestration of the Pathways project would be 13.9 Mt CO2 captured by 2030 — 4.2 MT per year — and 62 Mt per year by 2050. A buildout of CCUS infrastructure in Alberta’s refining and petrochemical complex in the Edmonton area would capture CO2 from gas combustion. “That then puts them on the road to net-zero aviation fuels, net-zero chemicals, what-have-you,” Chris Bataille, adjunct research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “If you look at this as a transition, it’s a necessary thing to do, and we have the right geology for it, and these companies know how to do this kind of thing.”

In addition to CCUS, Alberta also now plans to become a nuclear power producer. A company called Energy Alberta plans to deploy existing Canadian nuclear technology — the CANDU reactor. It proposes to build a 1,000 megawatt twin CANDU MONARK reactor north of Peace River, Alberta. It is now in the early stage of a federal Impact Assessment process. If the federal Liberal government is serious about achieving its ambitious climate policy objectives, it needs to either help Alberta with its ambitious decarbonization efforts, which would include some major federal subsidies, or just get out of its way and let Alberta do what it does best, which is innovate.

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Business

Rhetoric—not evidence—continues to dominate climate debate and policy

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From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Myths, fallacies and ideological rhetoric continue to dominate the climate policy discussion, leading to costly and ineffective government policies,
according to a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, nonpartisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“When considering climate policies, it’s important to understand what the science and analysis actually show instead of what the climate alarmists believe to be true,” said Kenneth P. Green, Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of Four Climate Fallacies.

The study dispels several myths about climate change and popular—but ineffective—emission reduction policies, specifically:

• Capitalism causes climate change: In fact, according to several environment/climate indices and the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World Index, the more economically free a country is, the more effective it is at protecting its environment and combatting climate change.

• Even small-emitting countries can do their part to fight climate change: Even if Canada reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to zero, there would be
little to no measurable impact in global emissions, and it distracts people from the main drivers of emissions, which are China, India and the developing
world.

• Vehicle electrification will reduce climate risk and clean the air: Research has shown that while EVs can reduce GHG emissions when powered with
low-GHG energy, they often are not, and further, have offsetting environmental harms, reducing net environmental/climate benefits.

• Carbon capture and storage is a viable strategy to combat climate change: While effective at a small scale, the benefits of carbon capture and
storage to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions on a massive scale are limited and questionable.

“Citizens and their governments around the world need to be guided by scientific evidence when it comes to what climate policies make the most sense,” Green said.

“Unfortunately, the climate policy debate is too often dominated by myths, fallacies and false claims by activists and alarmists, with costly and ineffective results.”

Four Climate Fallacies

  • This study examines four climate narratives circulating in public discourse regarding climate change.
  • Fallacy 1: Climate Change Is Caused by Capitalism. As we will observe, this is backward: the more capitalist a country is, the more effective it is at protecting its environment and combatting climate change.
  • Fallacy 2: Even Small-Emitting Countries Can Do Their Part to Fight Climate Change. Again, in reality, even a casual inspection of the emission trends and projections of large-emitting countries such as China would reveal that for small-emitting countries like Canada, even driving their greenhouse gas emissions to zero would have no measurable impact in reducing climate risk.
  • Fallacy 3: Vehicle Electrification Will Reduce Climate Risk and Clean the Air. However, when looking beyond the hype, it becomes evident that vehicle electrification presents an array of climate and environmental benefits and harms that extend beyond climate change.
  • Fallacy 4: Carbon Capture and Storage Is a Viable Strategy to Combat Climate Change. This fallacy, most popular with those in the fossil fuel industry and those of a more market-oriented and politically conservative bent, is no more realistic than the previous three. An examination of the history, effectiveness, and efficiency of carbon capture and storage suggests that it is a far more limited approach to regulating greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than proponents suggest.
Kenneth-Green-2017.jpg

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
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