📍Ritz Carlton I Maldives 🇲🇻
🎥martadtravels I IG pic.twitter.com/BUai3yKYSD

— 𝕏 Travels, Hotels and Resorts (@em3dia) June 23, 2024

Of course, if the Maldives had cooperated with the climate alarmists and disappeared under the rising seas (seas, by the way, have been rising dramatically since the glaciers began melting 15,000 years ago, gaining 450 feet since the glacial maximum), the racist ban would never have happened. Nobody would be vacationing in this paradise. 

📍Velassaru I Maldives 🇲🇻
🎥doctor_hassan I IG pic.twitter.com/OrDATtqNIp

— 𝕏 Travels, Hotels and Resorts (@em3dia) June 24, 2024

As billions have been invested in the tourist industry, airports have been opening, and writers at The New York Times are flummoxed by the persistence of the islands despite assurances from climate scientists that they could never survive. 

The big climate risk, as researchers like @GernotWagner emphasize, is surprises--unexpected effects from messing w/ systems we don't understand. Lots of those surprises will be bad. But some are happy--ocean islands may be less vulnerable than we thought. https://t.co/uJtXtdeIPH

— 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 (@CharlesCMann) June 27, 2024

Scientists are flocking to the islands to discover their secrets for survival. Never, for a moment, have they considered the simple reality that they have been wrong all along because the climate is far too complicated for them to understand. 

On a wisp of land in the Indian Ocean, two hops by plane and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping at the bone-white sand are just about all that breaks the stillness of a hot, windless afternoon.

The very existence of low-slung tropical islands seems improbable, a glitch. A nearly seamless meeting of land and sea, peeking up like an illusion above the violent oceanic expanse, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.

And indeed, when the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.

Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.

Scientists have come to understand some but not all of the reasons for this. Which is why a team of them recently converged in the Maldives, on an island they’d spend weeks outfitting with instruments and sensors and cameras.

I am all for scientists flocking to the islands to discover what makes them tick. This is what scientists should be doing, after all--trying to understand the secrets of the universe, not tweeting pronouncements about how we are all doomed. But doom and gloom sell, help undermine capitalism, justify sending ungodly amounts of money to the friends and business associates of politicians, and most importantly of all keep the grant money flowing. 

You can still find people predicting the imminent demise of the Maldives. The dates keep moving farther away. But then again, you can still find the website of Heaven's Gate, despite comet Hale-Bopp not having ushered in the destruction of the Earth. 

Reality is inconvenient for some people, and that often includes climate scientists, who get every prediction wrong, and with each bad prediction, more money keeps flowing in from government officials who need an excuse to waste trillions of dollars on useless projects. 

We are decades beyond the time the Maldives were predicted to have run out of drinking water, but if the continued investment in tourism by international corporations is any indication, then the smart money is betting that water will be available for decades to come. 

Predictions are hard, especially about the future--so said Niels Bohr, a scientist whose warning about excessive confidence should have been heeded by climate gurus. But then again, Bohr was not dependent on politicians who needed convenient predictions to fund his research. Back then, people were more interested in physical reality. 

During the Obama Administration, signs were put up in Glacier National Park that predicted the imminent demise of the glaciers after which the park was named. 2020 was the drop dead date. 

Remember that time in 2019 when the National Park Service removed signs in Glacier National Park that read “They [the glaciers] are now rapidly shrinking due to human-caused climate change. Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Yet another… pic.twitter.com/THXNE7Tk0i

— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) May 19, 2024

The signs are gone because the glaciers are not. 

Of course, it is quite possible that CO2 from burning fossil fuels might be altering the weather for good or ill, although physics suggests that storms would become less rather than more destructive. After all, tropical storms are driven by temperature differentials, not absolute temperatures. 

But we really don't know, and when people don't know things, they should be cautious about asserting that they do. 

But caution doesn't generate trillions of dollars in "investments," and that is the point of climate "science." Even if anthropogenic climate change is real, climate science is not. 

It is a scam.