Pants On Fire

Did you happen to catch this alarming news article last week?

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal

It ran first in the British Independent but was later picked up by papers and wire services around the world.  When I read it, I remember thinking that there weren't many details, but I've become so immune to global-warming-alarmism that I just, um, moved on.  Tim Blair was a bit more curious than I, and bothered to follow up.

Terrifying! You’ll note, however, that Lean doesn’t tell us exactly when Lohachara vanished. Was it last week? A few months ago? Maybe we’ll find out later.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

It’s the domino theory of island obliteration! As environmentalists always warned, once Lohachara falls, that’s it for Egypt.

The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Got that right, Geoffrey. I can’t remember Lohachara ever disappearing previously.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years’ time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

By quite a margin, as it happens. Lean doesn’t say so, but Lohachara apparently vanished two decades ago. So much for Lean’s scoop; the event took place back when Lean had hair, and several years before he emerged from a coma. Some locals aren’t buying that global warming line, by the way:

Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels.

“Erosion and accretion are natural phenomena. Across the world islands submerge and new ones emerge. This is natural,” Raha said.

To the never-ending dismay of the true, human-caused-global-warming believers, most Americans aren't terribly worried -- even given Al Gore's silly "documentary."  And I think it's probably due to the succession of lies and exaggerations that they continue to publish and which the media just can't resist passing on.

The global-warmers insist that they have science on their side, but they've interpreted scientific research to fit their preconceived ideas and concocted computer models to "prove" them.  Human-caused global warming is a theory and nothing more.  It's a compelling theory, to be sure, but there is plenty of science that disagrees.

While there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the earth is warming, there is also a lot of evidence that it's cyclical, caused by natural forces and may even have started to reverse.  Scientists will no doubt continue to debate the issue, but in the end they should have no more say in the political decision about meeting or ignoring the potential problem than any of the rest of us.

And they don't do themselves any good by printing whoppers like this disappearing island.