Global Frauding

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports

Published: 24 December 2006

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 cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Terrifying. Screaming headlines. We're all going to die! Retroactively, apparently. Because Lohachara island actually disappeared 22 years ago. The Sundarban Islands are what are known as "alluvial islands". In layman's terms, they are made of "mud".

If the island was actually the home of 10,000 people at one time, their activities, particularly in disturbing mangrove trees that probably had a great deal to do with holding said mud in place, likely had a great deal to do with said mud dissolving. Of course, we won't find out whether that was the actual case with the kind of reporting that we are seeing from the Independent. Environmental scaremongering is getting completely out of hand at this point. This is outright fraud and the Independent's environmental editor should be fired.

H/T to Tim Blair for the link to the retroactive destruction of the island. Also posting: Dean's World, Bill's Bites,