CLIMATE CHANGE
“In July 2023, a buoy in the Florida Keys measured a temperature of 101.1°F (38.4°C). Headlines proclaimed Florida had hit ‘hot-tub levels.’”
Damaged flood defenses in the Maldives
Water, water everywhere Kiribati has a maximum elevation of 81 meters, the Bahamas tops out at 63 m and the Maldives and Tuvalu each stand small at only 5 m. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that sea level rise represents such an existential threat to SIDS. The amount of water on earth doesn’t change, though its distribution does. When temperatures are warmer a lot of that water stored as ice finds its way into the ocean, though that’s not the only way sea levels increase. Thermal expansion also plays a role, albeit a smaller one, alongside ice melt as to why ocean levels rise. Simply put, water expands as it gets warmer – and the water is always getting warmer. In July 2023, a buoy in the Florida Keys measured a temperature of 101.1°F (38.4°C). When the news broke, many of the headlines proclaimed Florida had hit “hot-tub levels.” According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which published the data, normal water temperatures for that area and time of year should have been between 23°C - 31°C, in other words, too cold for a comfortable hot tub. More recently, the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that January 2024 was the warmest on their record books. Taking the previous 12-month period into account, the EU agency also recorded an average temperature of 1.52°C above the 1850-1900 pre- industrial average.
To get an idea of how ocean levels may rise in conjunction with warmer temperatures, NASA’s Sea Level Projection Tool offers a range of different scenarios. If temperatures are kept to the target of 1.5°C, sea levels are projected to increase about 0.44 m by the end of the century. Under the most extreme warming scenario (which is unlikely but possible), sea levels could rise by 1.6 m by 2100. If waters rise in places like Florida, residents can escape inland. For SIDS, there is no such escape route, a fact made all the more dire in another major climate-related danger. A Category 5 problem A more immediate, short-term problem facing SIDS are extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones.
storms. Maria was the first Category 5 storm to hit tiny Dominica. No corner of the island was unaffected; debris was strewn everywhere, all of the country’s medical centers were damaged, and lingering flooding complicated rescue and clean-up efforts. By one estimate, 98 percent of the island’s roofs were damaged. Making matters worse, Hurricane Maria knocked out Dominica’s intranet, cellular and radio services, cutting it off from the world. Eventually, 65 people were dead and damage surpassed US$1 billion, an especially high cost for a country of only 72,000 people. Warmer waters and moist air are fuel to hurricanes, and more powerful storms only add to their individual effects: such as flooding from increased rainfall, storm surges and sea rise.
2017 was an especially illustrative year, when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate hammered the Caribbean. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest on record, killing more than 3,000 people and causing hundreds of billions of US dollars in damage. Damage in places like Texas and Puerto Rico may have grabbed the headlines, but SIDS also bore the brunt of the
Devastation caused by Hurricane Maria on the island of Dominica. 95 percent of homes were destroyed
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