Remember how we’ve been told for years now that climate change, and hence rising sea levels, were an imminent threat to islands and island nations around the world? Well, the New York Times reported a few days ago, oops:

The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish

When the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.

Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.

Climate realists have been reporting the growth of island atolls for years, but were resolutely ignored. And now of course the Times behaves like they and their sources are noticing this inconvenient fact for the very first time.

The rest of this long—very very long—feature labors mightily to say there’s a still a problem, and scientists are working hard to understand the "complexities” of the situation.

One thing the story avoids saying, however, is that the science apparently isn’t "settled.”

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