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PrintJune 14, 2010
Starring Al Gore as Gilligan
The hits just keep coming for poor Al and this time even Tipper won't be there to comfort America's punch line. The former VP, Nobel prize winner and best selling author had predicted in "Earth in the Balance" that many small Pacific islands would be devastated and that millions of their poor residents would forced to leave their homes as rising sea levels engulfed their ancestral islands. However, the Washington Times tells us that.
In a forthcoming issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji documented changes in 27 vulnerable, low-lying reef islands in the Central Pacific. Using aerial photographs taken as early as 1944, the areas were carefully mapped and compared with modern satellite images.
[...]
According to various studies, sea levels appear to have risen about 8 inches since the year 1860, but these Pacific islands continue to prosper nonetheless. This new study attributed size differences over time to the effect of ocean swells pounding and eroding windward shorelines. On leeward sides protected from the swells, coastlines grew. In other words, nature struck a near-perfect balance, wholly unaffected by the purported evils of America's internal combustion engines.
[...]
According to various studies, sea levels appear to have risen about 8 inches since the year 1860, but these Pacific islands continue to prosper nonetheless. This new study attributed size differences over time to the effect of ocean swells pounding and eroding windward shorelines. On leeward sides protected from the swells, coastlines grew. In other words, nature struck a near-perfect balance, wholly unaffected by the purported evils of America's internal combustion engines.
So how could Al have been so wrong? Did he intentionally embrace phony science out of profit motive? Perhaps this was all just an honest mistake or another silly Al Gore faux pas. After all this has happened before, at least it did on television.
The castaways on "Gilligan's Island" were faced with a similar situation. The professor had been taking careful measurements of the sea level in the lagoon and had determined with scientific precision that the island was sinking. Fear gripped the castaways and they began to devote their full resources to the building and provisioning of a raft for the evacuation of the island. The tension mounted as the water level rose day by day.
Just when things appeared at their most bleak it was discovered that the professor's measuring stick (which looked suspiciously like a hockey stick) was being used by Gilligan as a stake for his lobster traps. Each day Gilligan moved the stake further into the lagoon in order to catch bigger lobsters, leading the professor to hypothesize that the island was sinking into the ocean.
Is it possible that Al was fishing for bigger lobsters to ship back home to Tipper?
paboehmke@yahoo.com
