171–180 of 211 posts
The image of the government official standing in the water "on what used to be dry land" is quite dramatic.[1] Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels. A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse). [1] https://www.reuters.com/resize…
Others are citing various examples of states without territory, such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta or various governments-in-exile throughout history, so I thought I'd throw Estonia into the ring, which has its government backed up in Luxembourg in case the Russians invade: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/data-embassy/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on how big of an army you have. Plenty of states get recognition not because other states want to, but because they have sufficient ability to defend their borders.
> Plenty of states get recognition … because they have sufficient ability to defend their borders. This is not always the case. There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land (and much more contested areas too, of course) but were never accepted as a state by many (any?) others. Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
I did not say it was always the case. I said "plenty of", not "every".
Life and politics are complicated, and I left plenty of room in my original statement for nuance and counter examples, please do not remove that for me.
> There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land
Unchanging is not the same as uncontested, and I'd argue that IS never had an "unchanging" area of land. Every square foot of IS territory was actively contested, and if you look at the map of its territory over time it moves and shifts and is full of uncontrolled pockets. The nice, clean maps of IS territory on the news were in fact simplifications for easy public consumption. The real situation on the ground was always much more fluid and complex than that. If you look at a map[0] of the actual territory that IS controlled, it is pretty far from the necessary boundaries to run a state. Put bluntly, this is a battle map, not the kind of map that you can make a state out of.
Even the areas that IS held, it did not hold for very long or very securely. Take Tikrit, for example, which IS only held from June 2014 to March 2015, with forces massing for the attack in February. It's hard to argue that a group holds "unchanging" territory when major cities are changing hands every 10 months or so. Furthermore, if an opposing force is able to mass an army outside your city and put siege to it, you are very far away from having "sufficient ability to defend their borders". Given that IS' territorial claims collapsed rather quickly, I think that assertion is pretty good.
> Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
Right, because the war was still on, IS was still trying to seize the land and fortify the borders of what they hoped would eventually be their state. If IS had won or fought the battle to a draw, I have no doubt that they would have gotten roughly the same level of international recognition that say, North Korea gets and they'd stop being "so called". But they didn't do that, so they never stopped being "so called".
Really, the counter example you should have gone for here is Haiti. Haiti unquestionably was capable of defending its borders, and in fact repelled several attempts to retake the island. It also did not get recognized for nearly 20 years by basically anyone until they agreed to reimburse France for the loss of their property, including distastefully the value of the slaves who were now free. While plenty of states get recognized once they manage to successfully hold and defend territory, not every state gets recognized that way. Sometimes other factors dominate, such as the fear of other slave holding states in recognizing the independence of a country created via a slave revolt.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State#/media/File:Near...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By the time shit hits the fan, it'll be too late. You can't "fix" the climate, you can only prevent it from getting to a state that needs fixing. (And we're failing at that)
Point is, the hand-wringing and the cries of "won't-somebody-do-something!!" are silly. If you really believe what you say, then go and act. A time of great crisis is also a time of great opportunity.
If 80% of people took precautions to keep from getting covid, and 20% went out and lived their life, the decision of the 80% to stay inside was irrelevant because the 20% would keep the virus in circulation.
If 80% of people stop buying fossil fuels, and 20% of people buy 500% more fossil fuels because the price is falling...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that I believe you're using 2-TEU-size containers. A ship will hold 10-20k TEU. So we're talking about 44-88 shiploads.
If A) the container ships could tolerate containers full of dirt and rock (nope-- each of these 2-TEU containers would weigh 100 tonnes... compare to gross tonnage of ~200000 tonnes and you're only moving 2000 such containers in a load), B) the containers themselves could safely tolerate this much mass & weight (nope), and B) raising the island 1 meter is enough (probably nope).
Pure theater. > Kofe said he delivered the video address, scheduled to be aired at COP26 on Tuesday, in a place that used to be dry land, adding that Tuvalu was seeing a lot of coastal erosion. Coastal erosion, not climate change, not rising sea levels.
> Coastal erosion is the loss or displacement of land, or the long-term removal of sediment and rocks along the coastline due to the action of waves, currents, tides, wind-driven water, waterborne ice, or other impacts of storms. > According to the IPCC, sea level rise caused by climate change will increase coastal erosion worldwide, significantly changing the coasts and low-lying coastal areas. Interesting.
My point is that there’s no reason to think that the land Tuvalu has lost has anything to do with climate change. Pretending otherwise is pure theater.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their problem is not where people will sit (likely NZ will oblige) but that they want to retain control over other territorial claims/benefits such as fishing zone, domain, orbital rights et al.
The fact that they want that does not mean that they will receive that; they may well turn out to be one of the many nations in history who lose their claims. We have an international consensus regarding basic human rights and process for refugees which means that they near certainly will get an ability to resettle somewhere, but their fishing rights may well be divided among the surviving neighbouring nations withou…
Tuvalu is just 26 sq km. How many bulk carriers filled with dirt you need to raise that by a few meters?
That's 2.6 * 10^8 cubic meters of compacted dirt and rock needed to raise the island by 10m-- which is more than 1500 kg/cubic meter (1.5 tonnes/cubic meter). The largest bulk carriers manage about 400,000 DWT. So, about 1000 trips of the largest around... ignoring the logistical and ecological challenges of procuring that much material and using it to raise the island in a durable way.
They should look at the metaverse. I am told that is the future.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments, please don't take HN on generic tangents, and especially not generic flamewar tangents. All that leads to predictable and lower-quality discussion. We'd like the vector to point the opposite way here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
