'At the switched-on South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC), the regional authority on issues like climate change, scientists personally long acquainted with the Pacific Islands have opinions that climate change lobbyists prefer to deafen thei


In January, the Australian government said there was no firm evidence to prove that some Pacific Islanders are close to become pushed from their islands by rising sea levels.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said it was too early to accurately assess sea level trends.

He was responding to a policy paper in which the Australian Labour Party urged the government to be prepared to accept sea level refugees from such countries as Tuvalu, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, where advocates of the rising sea level theory insist that land, freshwater and food supplies are being eroded by a climb in the level of the sea.

Mr Downer's spokesman said land was being lowered but also pushed up by geological forces deep inside the planet.

ISLANDS BUSINESS agrees with Mr Downer. Some parts of some Pacific Islands are being flooded by the sea. But the causes of this loss of land are not clear.

Recent high tide events in very low-lying Tuvalu and the erosion of a couple of sand keys in Kiribati's Tarawa lagoon are touted by climate change doomsday proponents as being clear evidence of the submergence of the islands and eventually the whole countries.

A few small Papua New Guinea islands are sinking. They are located in a sinking zone of tectonic activity.

In recent months, enormous international publicity has been given to the plight of the village of Lateu in Torba, Vanuatu, where people have been moved to higher grounds because of encroachment by the sea.

This has been presented dishonestly as a classic case of what other island villages can expect-of being driven inland and eventually to higher places like Australia, due to the rising sea level caused by the greenhouse climatic effect.

Lateu is allegedly one of the first such cases of dislocation. If records are read closely without blinkers, Lateu is “very vulnerable to storm surges and tidal waves due to its very low elevation. It also has suffered from frequent inundations and coastal erosion of two to three metres per annum.

The village is five metres from the high-water mark and any strong south-easterly (wind) during high tide will generate waves that will overtop the one-metre coral strand that acts as a barrier and flood the whole village and dwellings.

That description sounds like one that can be applied to dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of poorly chosen settlement sites in every part of the world, some as large as London.

The trouble may perhaps partly be due to climate change. But it is more likely to be correctly attributable to perfectly normal natural forces of nature.

At the switched-on South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC), the regional authority on issues like climate change, scientists personally long acquainted with the Pacific Islands have opinions that climate change lobbyists prefer to deafen their ears to.

Islands move up and down perpendicularly because of what is happening far below in the cranky and molten interior of the planet.

Above the ocean, the climate moves in great periodic cycles that are only now being discovered and are far from being understood. These motions are alleged to have become the theorised cause of sea level change.

Natural coastal erosion is an aeon-old process now being accelerated by engineering, even very basic engineering, that unwittingly intensifies erosive forces.

Climate change scientists are producing worrying data; the quickening retreat of glaciers, alterations to vegetative cover, the disappearance or appearance of animal life in regions formerly abundant or lacking in such species.

Something is happening. It may be attributable at least in part to the impact of vast volumes of pollution pumped into the atmosphere by the industry of mankind. Research also shows that the planet is beset by long cycles of cooling and warming that have dropped and raised ocean levels by hundreds of metres.

Climate change? Ocean levels? Questions about these issues have no unchallengeable answer.
Should Tuvalu disappear next month, Australia, being a compassionate country, can be counted on to do its bit in being a refuge for sea level refugees.