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El Salvador Wet Dreams

El Salvador in battle against tide of climate change - Climate Change - Environment - The Independent


The forest of towering, dead mangrove trees stretches along the beach as far as the eye can see. As the crashing waves rise and fall, short stumps emerge and vanish beneath the Pacific Ocean. Climate change has come early to the Bajo Lempa region of western El Salvador.

A tiny rise in the sea level has, according to local people, seen about 1,000ft of the mangroves on which they depend vanish beneath the ocean since 2005. ...

The horror, look at those flooded mangroves the Indy picture shows... Of course any actual data or link to any data about what the sea level has been doing in El Salvador is absent. That would make the story actually interesting.

But hey lucky old Simeon Tegel, "Travel for this story was funded with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting" and as Simeon says: "I climb, mountaineer and surf and there is nothing I love more than getting into the backcountry, whether it is the Amazon rainforest, the high Andes or catching a wave at a remote Pacific beach."

Let's hope he caught some waves at least to make his paid for trip worthwhile.


Within historical memory, both Mont St. Michel (in Normandy) and St. Micheal's Mount (S. England) were hills surrounded by a large oak forests and the sea somehow swallowed those oak forests and left tidal bays....all before climate change was such a bad thing. If you care to, you can still dredge up stumps of those forests out of the muck in both places.

Heligoland, now a land speck in the North (/West) Sea was also within semi-historical memory a much larger island. ( What we know of it is semi legend in that it was important religiously to the pre-christian pagans of Northern Europe and it's EXTREMELY unlikely that such a small speck in the ocean would have been referred to so often if it was only sand dune off the coast.)

In the middle ages, a combination of high tides and massive storms, massively flooded the German low lands that are to the south and west of the Danish peninsula and that whole area. Leading to huge loss of life and literal vanishing of entire communities and land as it got washed away.

This sort of thing is not new and whether or not it has anything to do with Climate chnage induced by humans as opposed to bad luck and geology other factors is, oh I'll be kind: "debateable"

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