Samoan Brianna Fruen, 23, was turned into a climate activist by her school teacher and 350.org when she was 11. She gave a first person account to world leaders at Glasgow’s COP26 about what it feels like when her home and free and easy way of life is threatened by rising sea level. A 30-second search on a smart phone would have shown that atoll nations are growing in area. Her teacher and 350.org had fed her lies. Bumbling Boris followed showing that he too needs a basic education in critical thinking, logic and science.

In 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published the first of his three-volume classic Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes in the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation. Charles Darwin received the first volume in 1830 which he took with him on HMS Beagle, the others he received during his voyage. Lyell suggested that coral atolls formed around the rims of ancient submarine volcanoes.

Darwin’s voyage allowed him to inspect many volcanic islands, coral reefs and atolls. In his 1842 book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Darwin showed that volcanoes were at various heights above the sea floor. If sea level falls or a volcano rises from the sea floor, coral attached to the volcano is killed upon exposure to air. If sea level rises, coral attaches itself to a volcano and grows vertically and horizontally as sea level rises. Even very rapid sea level rises enlarge coral atolls and do not destroy them. Darwin drew a cross-section of a coral atoll on a sunken volcanic substrate showing the effects of a relative sea level rise by the sinking of a volcano.

In 1897, three holes into the Tuvalu’s main atoll were drilled by Professor Sir T.W. Edgeworth David to test Darwin’s theory. More than 300 metres of coral was intersected showing that coral kept growing as the substrate sank. Deep drilling through coral at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia in the 1960s intersected volcanic rocks at depth. The theories of Lyell and Darwin were validated.

An analysis of more than 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans showed that some remained stable (40 per cent) or increased in area (40 per cent). Only 20 per cent decreased in area yet it is widely promoted in green activist circles that coral islands, atolls and reefs are disappearing with sea level rise. Some islands grew as much as 5.6 hectares in a decade. Tuvalu’s main atoll, Funafuti, comprising 33 islands around the rim of a lagoon, gained 32 hectares during the last 115 years.

Over the period from 14,700 to 6,000 years ago during the 130-metre post-glacial sea level rise, coral reefs kept up with sea level rise. The coral sand atoll islands were actually produced by the destruction of reef material during the two-metre sea level fall over the last 4,000 years which led to the emergence and death of coral.

Tuvalu is the symbol of a drowning Pacific island nation yet the total land area of Tuvalu has increased by 2.9 per cent over the last four decades. At the 2019 South Pacific Forum in Tuvalu, Australia was berated for refusing to commit economic suicide and close its coal industry despite handing out $500 million for climate change to the region. There was no mention of China. This shows the essence of the politics of climate change. It is a cash grab that knowingly ignores validated science.

Time magazine on June 2019 had a cover article entitled ‘Our sinking planet’ featuring a photograph of UN chief António Guterres thigh-deep in water at Tuvalu. He claimed that Tuvalu was one of the world’s countries most vulnerable to global warming and that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming resulting in polar ice cap melting, sea water expansion, sea level rise and inundation of Pacific island nations.

Every single aspect of this narrative is scientifically wrong. It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Ice cores show warming is followed by a rise in carbon dioxide. Ice melts for a diversity of reasons and the Pacific atoll nations have grown in size.

Guterres flew to Tuvalu in a carbon dioxide emitting jet made out of aluminium, a metal that requires huge emissions of carbon dioxide during mining, transport, processing, smelting and refining. I guess it’s acceptable to be a hypocrite and fraudulent for a cover photograph on Time, a magazine that had a cover article of 1977 entitled ‘How to survive the coming ice age’ and a 2007 article ‘The global warming survival guide’. No point in changing magazines, Newsweek warned us of the forthcoming ice age in 1975 and later warned we would fry-and-die.

In South Tarawa, Kiribati’s 15-square-kilometre island capital, crowded with some 50,000 people, coral blocks are used for seawalls, causeways between islands and creating new land. This has led to greater storm erosion, changes in sedimentation patterns and more common inundation during storm surges. The real danger to atolls is a sea-level fall and human activity such as removal of coral sand for cement, building of roads and airstrips together with ground water extraction, blasting of reefs for shipping lanes and use of reef blocks or coral sand in concrete for sea walls.

It was predicted in 1988 that some of the 1,196 islands of the Maldives would be under water by 2018 and that drinking water would run out for the 200,000 inhabitants. Thirty years have been and gone since this dire prediction. The Maldives is thriving, has potable water, the population has doubled and there has been a building boom of waterside tourist facilities.

A global scale analysis of 221 islands in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans reveals ‘a predominantly stable or accretionary trend in an area of atoll islands worldwide’ throughout the 21st century. Land area for the 221 studied islands had increased by six per cent between 2000 and 2017. The Maldives alone expanded 37.5 square kilometres from 2000-2017. This is in accord with a 2019 global scale analysis of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans that revealed 89 per cent were either stable or growing in size and only a few small islands had slightly decreased in size.

Climate activism by the IPCC and COP is littered with lies, false claims, fraud and cooked data. Young women like Brianna Fruen and Greta Thunberg are paraded to deliver an emotional fact-free message and yet claim to follow the science. The COP26 doomsday scenario for Pacific atoll nations has nothing to do with climate, the environment or the welfare of islanders. These are UN-sponsored meetings to use their sticky fingers to extract money from Western countries that do not protect their economy, freedoms and sovereignty.