Bjorn Lomborg: Those (non) Disappearing Pacific Islands – ‘actually grown’

Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea. Yet new research shows this is not the entire – or even an accurate – picture.  island

Read the full story by Lomborg at www.wsj.com

Marc Morano, at Climate Depot, notes:

Hype and exaggeration serve no one. Their peer-reviewed study, published in the September 2015 issue of Anthropocene, revealed that since the middle of the 20th century the total land area of the islands has actually grown.

Telling viewers in the U.S. starkly that they’re “making this island disappear,” as a report from CNN’s John Sutter did in June 2015, makes for good, blame-laden television. But this reductionist, fact-averse rhetoric contributes to the idea that climate-change discussion should be a two-sided, cartoonish fight between those who say it is not real and those who say it is the worst problem facing humanity.

Even more insidiously, doom-mongering makes us panic and seize upon the wrong responses to global warming. At a cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually, the Paris climate agreement, recently ratified by China, is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty. It will slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources.

 

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