Back in 2012, the former president of the Maldives Islands, Mohamed Nasheed sounded climate alarm bells, saying, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, my country will be underwater in seven years.” However, as of 2020, the Republic of Maldives remains above water and has become a popular tourist destination. Instead of fleeing to higher ground, the island nation is investing millions in infrastructure meant to attract even more tourists.
Located just to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, the Republic of Maldives is a small nation made up of an archipelago group of approximately 1,200 islands. Officially, it is the world’s lowest lying country with an average elevation of just 1.5 meters above sea level. It is one of the places that climate alarmists like to point to as an example of a place in immediate danger from so-called climate change.
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But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least as far as long-term investors believe. Since 2019, no fewer than five new airports featuring 2,200 meter runways suitable for Boeing 737s and the Airbus A320s have opened on the island nation. Dozens of new resorts have opened on the tiny nation in the past seven years, all of this to accommodate the more than 1.5 million tourists expected each year.
The investors, mainly from Abu Dhabi, have poured more than $52 million into the airport projects and are banking that the airports and the island nation itself will stay above sea level for at least another 50 years. Why would supposedly savvy investors throw money away on a nation that climate-change experts assure won’t be here soon due to undeniable sea level rise?
Perhaps it’s because the people of the island nation and the investors have heard the same scare tactics before. In 1988, French news agency AFP reported that a gradual rise in sea level due to global warming threatened to destroy most of the island nation by 2018.
“A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years, according to authorities,” AFP reported. “The Environmental Affairs Director, Mr. Hussein Shihab said an estimated rise of 20-30 centimeters in the next 20-40 years could be ‘catastrophic’ for most of the islands, which were no more than a meter above sea level.”
This disaster, of course, never occurred. Nor did the drinking water emergency they were supposed to have faced “by 1992.”
But why didn’t the “drowning” of the Maldives occur as global-warming experts assured us it would? And is it still inevitable? A University of Plymouth study released earlier this year may hold the answers. “The results show that islands composed of gravel material can evolve in the face of overtopping waves, with sediment from the beach face being transferred to the island’s surface,” wrote Plymouth University’s Alan Williams.
“This means the island’s crest is being raised as sea level rises, with scientists saying such natural adaptation may provide an alternative future that can potentially support near-term habitability, albeit with additional management challenges, possibly involving sediment nourishment, mobile infrastructure and flood-proof housing,” Williams wrote.
In other words, the archipelago’s inhabitants as well as the archipelago itself are capable of adapting to the circumstances that climate alarmists insist will lead to its demise.
The University of Plymouth Study tracks nicely with another study done by the University of Auckland in 2017, which showed the same phenomenon happening with the Pacific Ocean island nation of Tuvalu, a country that Al Gore assured us in An Inconvenient Truth would also be under water by now. That study showed that Tuvalu, far from shrinking, actually grew in size by 180 acres in the 40-plus years that they were studied.
Climate alarmists peddle fear as a way of getting people to fall in line with their job-killing, people-hating agenda. Unless you join us, they claim, the world will end because of what we’ve done to our planet. They say such things to get us to fork over our money and freedom with no questions asked.
But when those with their own money on the line ignore such fearmongering and put millions of dollars into projects on “doomed” ground such as the Maldives, that says something about the legitimacy of the climate alarmists. People who are forward-looking ignore the climate cultists — and so should we all.
