Seven Years Ago Climate Scientists Warned the Maldives Were Disappearing. Guess What?

Written by Peter Heck

I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. From a recent New York Times piece, spectacularly entitled, “A Surprising Climate Find:”

‘I’m confident that there’ll be islands in the Maldives’ 50 or 100 years from now, one of the researchers on the team, Paul Kench, told me while we were on Dhigulaabadhoo. ‘They’re not going to look like these islands; they’re going to be different. But there will be land here.’

Just a casual admission that those islands the climate change cult said were going to disappear aren’t going to be disappearing after all.

Stunning. Who could have guessed it?

Though I don’t normally recommend reading a New York Times piece, this one gets better the deeper you dig.

First, can we spend just a moment acknowledging the greatness of the name “Dhigulaabadhoo.” I propose from now on that the naming of cities, towns, provinces, states, islands, and pretty much all territory henceforth be turned over to the creative minds of preschool classrooms everywhere. You can’t even say “Dhigulaabadhoo” and not smile just a little bit afterward.

(You just tried it, didn’t you?)

Regarding the content of this magnificent story, let’s first acknowledge the embarrassing about-face it represents for the climate hysterics.

Just seven years ago, “climate scientists” were panicking – literally publicly panicking – that the Maldives would be all but submerged in just a few years.

They sufficiently scared the president of the Maldives at the time, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who went to the United Nation’s 2017 climate conference to beg for help.

‘Our islands are slowly being inundated by the sea, one by one,’ he said. ‘If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist by the end of this century.’

Credit Solih for being smart enough to put doomsday outside of his own lifespan. Doing it that way guarantees that when it eventually becomes obvious he was all alarmism and no accuracy, he’ll be long gone. Yet here we are just seven years after he parroted those silly talking points and the veritable, trustworthy, imminently respectable climate scientists are having second thoughts about their projections. You know … like they do every time?

I don’t mean to be cynical, but honestly at this point I think we can agree it’s far more realism than cynicism to conclude thus: dire predictions bring media attention, governmental investment, massive philanthropic donations, and a very ostentatious lifestyle for these glorified weathermen. As long as there are scary graphs and catastrophic prognostications, there will be swanky climate conferences in tropical paradises to attend.

It’s about the money. It’s always been about the money.

If you doubt that, look only to this very New York Times piece that admitted they got the Maldives forecast completely wrong. Buried inside their carefully articulated humiliation is yet another doomsday prediction:

Though the research suggests that atolls aren’t about to wash away entirely, it hardly means they have nothing to worry about. Global warming is putting coral reefs under severe strain. If, say, the ice sheets melted faster than expected, then sea-level rise could accelerate sharply.

Okay, maybe that’s true. Of course, if Dr. Evil successfully built an army of sharks with “frickin laser beams on their heads,” those living on atolls would be in danger from that also. How many resources should we divert to take on that threat?

The question is what it has always been: Do we attempt to reconstitute the entire energy consumption of the globe, prevent the development of the Third World, and lock billions of people into grinding poverty in order to prevent something so outlandishly unlikely?

Ice sheets are thickening. So while it would be concerning if they melted, there’s no evidence to suggest that’s something we (1) need to worry about, and (2) could prevent no matter what we did anyway.

Which brings us to the most shocking part of this whole article. Finally, the piece quotes one of the researching asking the only question that has ever mattered in this “debate.”

‘To me, that’s the challenge,’ Paul Kengor stated. ‘How do you coexist with the change that’s coming?’

We are humans, not gods. We have breathtakingly minimal power to alter, adjust, or tamper with the workings of divinely programmed heavenly bodies like the sun and our earth. Even the most arrogant predictions acknowledge that even a return to pioneer living wouldn’t stop a “changing climate.”

So then, rather than invest trillions of dollars to fight a problem that might not even materialize, and that we couldn’t change anyway, why not spend our energy taking steps to respond to that change that is outside our ability to control?

Suppose the Maldives really were on cusp of imminent sinking (they are not at all). I’d say in that doomsday scenario it would make more sense to help find those people another place to live, and then relocate them and their belongings, than it would to mandate rolling brownouts in Birmingham, keep the people of South Sudan trapped in the Stone Age, and legislate mileage limits on Europeans’ summer vacations.

But then again, maybe I need to wait and hear what the “climate scientists” have to say about it all, between sips of piña coladas at this year’s tropical Tahitian climate summit.

This article was originally published by NotTheBee.com.

Peter Heck is a writer, speaker, and teacher from Indiana. He is married to Jenny, and is the father of three kids. Peter holds to the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture in his teaching and writing, and has a passion for biblical literacy and for demonstrating the Bible’s applicability to all of life. 

Peter is the lead opinion writer for “Not the Bee.” His opinions have also been published in the Washington Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. A former radio host, Peter produces a daily podcast and has authored a number of books on Christians and the culture.