Sinking Nations Are Pursuing Legal Options To Stave Off Destruction

forbes.com ^ | March 12, 2012 | Michael Bobelian

[Free ThinkerNY]

The Marshall Islands is approaching extinction. The threat is not from a plague or a warring neighbor. It is the very ocean that surrounds this archipelago of islands and atolls located in the Pacific Ocean just above the equator.

The math is as simple as it is deadly. As global temperatures rise, so will sea levels from three to six feet by the end of the century according to the Columbia University Earth Institute. The speckles of flat land that make up the Marshall Islands rise about seven feet above sea level.

In a few decades, scientists predict that rising ocean levels, combined with stronger, more frequent storms, will erode coastlines and destroy fresh water and agricultural supplies of low-elevation island nations (not to mention low-altitude coastlines across the globe).

After rising sea water renders these islands uninhabitable, it will then drive these nations out of existence. Disbursed populations living in legal limbo across the globe will make it nearly impossible to form and administer any form of government, leaving behind an unanchored Diaspora state. And even if a population from an individual nation flocks to a concentrated area, it will be “profoundly difficult to maintain a culture” in a new environment that barely resembles the abandoned homeland, explained Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law.

When the rising ocean swallows up these island nations entirely – perhaps by the end of the century – little will remain of them but wistful memories and underwater remnants of a modern-day Atlantis.

[Mad Dawgg]

"Yes, the land can rise or sink, but the water level stays the same."

There would be no way to measure such a thing. This is the point, they claim they know how much the water rose to within inches YET parts of Japan Moved FEET, not inches, but FEET during the big quake.

When Plates shift that much there is no way to tell what volume of water is in the oceans accurately (like there was any way to tell accurately in the first place) For instance when that large shift happened a fissure deep in ocean might have opened and lava shot up making a large plateau on the bottom of the ocean this would undoubtedly cause water to displace. Stuff like this happens frequently its how islands are formed yet none of this is ever talked about when they talk of oceans rising.