Eero Iloniemi is the managing editor of Nykypäivä, a Finnish newspaper. He went to the U.N.’s Cancun global warming shindig and asked a very inconvenient question.
The prime minister of Tuvalu, Apisai Ielemia, said rich Westerners were allowing his nation to perish. He showed a group of journalists, me among them, a video of floods that threaten to wash his tiny Pacific island nation to the sea…
‘Mr Prime Minister. In view of the impending deluge, how much have land prices fallen on Tuvalu?‘ I stammered.For some reason my question completely silenced the room packed with environmental press. After what I will charitably call an inquisitive stare, the prime minister gave his longwinded answer full of long-term projections of rising ocean levels. To be fair, he concluded with a simple declaration: ‘Land prices have not been affected.’
This baffles me. The Tuvaluans have experienced the very floods Ielemia had just shown us. If the ocean is encroaching the island, surely it would make sense to sell all your land, at any price, while you still have some. This should cause a dramatic drop in land value as the market gets flooded (no pun intended)…
The story gets even more baffling when one looks at the Maldives. Remember, this is the tiny nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean where the government held an underwater cabinet meeting in November 2009 to emphasise the imminent peril of climate change-induced rises in the ocean levels. But in the Maldives, too, land prices are holding.
This does bring up the question we asked several months ago:
If Al Gore really expects sea levels to rise, why did he buy an oceanfront estate in California?
H/T: Andrew Bolt
