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Global Warming Hysteria – The Worst Thing To Hit Taiwan Since….

This was a story that came out a couple of weeks ago that I had meant to get to, but have just been too darned busy. The object of my derision is an AP article titled “Rising sea levels threaten Taiwan“. Here is what’s happening:

When worshippers built a temple for the goddess Matsu in south Taiwan 300 years ago, they chose a spot they thought would be at a safe remove from the ocean. They did not count on global warming.

Now, as the island faces rising sea levels, the Tungshih township is forced to set up a new temple nearby, elevated by three metres (10 feet) compared with the original site.

“Right now, the temple is flooded pretty much every year,” said Tsai Chu-wu, the temple’s chief secretary, explaining why the 63-million-dollar project is necessary.

“Once the new temple is completed, we should be able to avoid floods and the threat of the rising sea, at least for many, many years,” he said.

The temple of Matsu, ironically often described as the Goddess of the Sea, is only one example of how global warming is slowly, almost imperceptibly piling pressure on Taiwan.

Mountains cover two thirds of Taiwan, but the heart of the island’s economy is concentrated in the remaining third, which stretches down the west coast and consists mostly of flat land near sea level.

This part of Taiwan is home to a string of populous cities, several industry zones, three nuclear power plants — and a petrochemical complex, built in the 1990s by Formosa Plastics Group for over 20 billion US dollars.

And unlike the temple, none of these crucial economic establishments can possibly be lifted, leaving them exposed to the elements.

I’ve been writing a lot of sarcastic “Oh No’s” lately, and this certainly deserves one, because, of course we know that it is impossible to tear down and rebuild any of the things mentioned in the previous paragraph. It might cost some money but doesn’t rebuilding and improving infrastructure actually help stimulate the economy (hello Obama $1 trillion stimulus package 2009).

The rest of the article is typical U.N. based Anthropogenic Global Warming disaster predictive boilerplate. But there is a detail that is glossed over in the article. That is the phenomenon known as subsidence. Here is how the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists describes subsidence:

Land subsidence can result from fluid (e.g. groundwater, petroleum) withdrawal in weakly consolidated materials. The loss of fluid causes consolidation of the empty pore spaces, which means that any voids in the soil previously filled with fluid are compressed by the mass of the overlying materials, effectively decreasing the soil volume and resulting in land subsidence. Examples of places experiencing land subsidence due to fluid withdrawal and subsequent soil consolidation include: the San Joaquin Valley, California; Houston, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Venice, Italy.

My partners in crime over at WattsUpWithThat (to some warmists, we ARE criminals) noticed that got glossed over too. They show that subsidence is indeed a major problem in parts of Taiwan, aand link to an article from April that explores the situation:

The high-speed railway is safe although a six-kilometer stretch of the system runs through sinking land in a southern county, transport officials said yesterday.

Safety concerns were raised after according to the Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) figures revealed that at its worst, the land at one site along the stretch in Yunlin County has sunk 55 centimeters over the past seven years.

That’s a nice little bit of subsidence, at just under two feet of land drop. I happen to live in the San Joaquin Valley, and am very familiar with the effects of subsidence. For all those who are doubting just how much subsidence can affect a region, here is a picture of the affects of subsidence on the area where I live.

That is a wee bit more that a couple of feet. In the case of the displaced Taiwanese temple, subsidence is the culprit here, not sea level rise caused by global warming.