In 2018, a study of aerial photos of 700 Pacific Islands showed that 89% were the same size or growing. This rather destroyed the idea that sea levels were swallowing small nations. The New York Times said nothing. Indeed, the only Pacific things shrinking were deserted sand drifts. No islands bigger than 10 hectares were getting smaller. Measured in square kilometers that’s “0.1”. Despite the media headlines and delegations from Kiribati and Tuvulu begging for money to hold back the tide, no islands with people living on them were shrinking. None, not one island in the Pacific big enough to matter, was disappearing. The largest 630 islands in the Pacific were had not being touched by climate change for decades.

In 2023 another study of 1,100 islands came to the same conclusion. To find that many islands they included things as small as one thousandth of a square kilometer — we’re talking about spits of sand 10 meters square. (There are whales larger than that.) //

They’re still not asking the sea level experts any hard questions, like, why didn’t you tell us this before, since we’ve had satellites since 1979? Didn’t you notice?

They’re not wondering if the UN knew this years ago and did nothing to inform the world.

The Times doesn’t question the sacred cow of rising sea levels — are the estimates of annual sea level rise really accurate? I mean, if no islands are disappearing, could those satellite estimates be wrong? Why do 1,000 tide gauges show seas are rising only 1mm a year, whereas the satellites say it’s 3mm a year? Is that because the satellite data was calibrated to a falling tide gauge in Hong Kong? Is it true that the raw satellite data showed very little rise in the 1990s, and that a lot of the rise is due to man-made adjustments?