Al Jazeera Supports Climate Grift – Tuvalu’s Islands Are Growing, Not Disappearing – Watts Up With That?

In Al Jazeera’s article, “‘We don’t want to disappear’: Tuvalu fights for climate action and survival,” reporter Lyndal Rowlands claims that the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is on the brink of disappearing beneath rising seas. This is false. Peer reviewed data show that most of Tuvalu’s islands are growing, keeping up with sea level rise (SLR) with the nation gaining land mass on net, and that SLR is not accelerating.

The story quotes Tuvalu’s Climate Change Minister, Maina Talia, calling for urgent “climate finance” and help to build seawalls to keep the islands above water. The piece also declares that Tuvalu “needs real commitments” from other nations so that Tuvaluans can “stay in Tuvalu” as the “climate crisis worsens.” It frames the country as a helpless victim of rising seas, citing the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and climate-finance NGOs to reinforce the narrative.

Yet, this story is simply false. Multiple peer-reviewed studies show that Tuvalu is not sinking—it is growing. According to research highlighted by Climate Realism, recent satellite and aerial analyses reveal that Tuvalu’s total land area has increased by 2.9 percent over the past four decades, with 74 percent of its islands expanding in size. Rather than drowning, Tuvalu’s natural processes of sediment deposition and coral accretion are exceeding, the local rate of sea-level rise.

Even The New York Times—no stranger to climate alarmism—recently acknowledged that many Pacific islands are growing, not vanishing. In 2024 The Times reported that “many low-lying coral islands are not shrinking, but instead are stable or increasing in land area.” This is consistent with long-term field measurements showing that atoll systems are dynamic, self-repairing, and resilient.

The claim that Tuvalu is “barely one meter above sea level” and faces imminent destruction is a talking point that has been circulating for more than 30 years. Yet, as documented at WUWT in “Remember When the Island of Tuvalu Was Going to Be Inundated by Sea Level Rise? Never Mind.”, Tuvalu remains very much above water. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Tides and Currents website, since the 1980s, SLR near Tuvalu has averaged roughly 3–4 millimeters per year— which is equivalent to a change of 1.29 feet in 100 years —hardly the apocalyptic surge portrayed by Al Jazeera. See the graph below.

Moreover, WUWT’s “Everything Climate” section explains that global satellite data show no evidence that sea-level rise is accelerating, and the rate of increase has remained largely unchanged since the 1950s. Coastal variability, driven by natural processes like El Niño cycles and sediment transport, explains much of what alarmist observers misinterpret as “climate-driven” loss.

If Tuvalu were truly in existential peril, it would not be investing heavily in new infrastructure and tourism amenities. The government has spent millions on airport improvements, resort facilities, and fiber-optic internet connectivity—all to expand the tourism trade. Those aren’t the actions of a nation preparing to vanish beneath the waves. They are the actions of a government seizing every opportunity to extract climate aid while modernizing its economy.

That brings us to the real story: money. Tuvalu’s leaders are campaigning for ever-greater “climate finance” commitments—what Minister Talia calls “real commitments” and “polluter-pay” reparations. In the article, he laments that the country “needs it now, in order for us to respond to the climate crisis.” But what Tuvalu really seeks is not salvation from the sea—it’s a bigger slice of the climate funding pie. As WUWT has observed, these small island governments have learned that portraying themselves as victims yields lucrative international sympathy and cash. They know a good grift when they see it.

Facts still matter. Tuvalu’s land mass is stable or growing. Its population is not evacuating. Its leaders are not panicking—they’re lobbying for money to be used for ongoing economic development. The “sinking islands” narrative is falsified by peer-reviewed evidence and decades of observations demonstrating that Tuvalu is not disappearing. Al Jazeera reporter Lyndal Rowlands could have discovered this with a simple Google search but instead repeated this decades-old myth without a single reference to the robust scientific literature disproving it.

What’s sinking is honest, fact-based journalism, not Tuvalu.

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