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1) This is an incompetent newspaper with a two-paragraph article about a scientific paper in press.

2) The paper is apparently entitled: “Sea-level fingerprint of continental water and ice mass change from GRACE”

3) There’s no abstract of the paper I can find.

4) The paper itself PROBABLY says nothing about the Maldives, doesn’t recommend we stop using groundwater irrigation, etc.

5) Sea level is in fact rising - VERY gradually, and it’s been doing so since the end of the last ice age. It’s mostly the water just thermally expanding, rather than ice melt.

6) “Water Mining” isn’t a term that’s just been invented; it’s been used for years, and I’ve heard it used many times before. The term “fossil water” is also routinely used; aquifers have water that’s accumulated over millions of years.

7) Major deep aquifers are obviously and provably being drained of water much, much faster than they’re being replenished; otherwise farmers wouldn’t need to keep drilling their wells deeper.

8) Just becuse one is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming (as I am) doesn’t mean that one ALSO has to believe it’s IMPOSSIBLE for humans to affect ANYTHING about the earth.

9)The amount of deepwater aquifer water used for irrigation is ENORMOUS; in the paper, the key issue will be the estimate of how much water that is; than a simple calculation should demonstrate the (fairly tiny) sea level rise that this usage causes.

10) We’re going to deplete these deepwater aquifers sometime in the next century at the current rate. This is a problem. It doesn’t mean we should stop all deepwater irrigation immediately and let billions starve. It means we need to continue efforts to use irrigation water more efficiently, and engineer/breed crops that use less water.