The network of the Tuvalu controversy is rather consistent with what other tools have brought to the understanding of the controversy and how it started and evolved throughout time. For long, Tuvalu was not hot news but most of the studies and actors were advocating the idea that Global Warming was the main reason for its programmed sinking into the Pacific Ocean. The 2000’s decade, culminating with the Copenhagen Climate Conference, elevated Tuvalu to the rank of global symbol and first actual laboratory for Global Warming induced legal, political and practical issues. Therefore, when new studies were published using the data provided by more accurate measuring system such as the SEAFRAME tide gauges network and concluding that over the past 20 years, sea-level has been particularly stable in the region, new actors entered the controversy while former ones repositioned themselves.
Among those new actors, the vast majority was composed of climate sceptics who used the symbol that Tuvalu has become for denouncing the so-called Global Warming scam. Because the climate sceptic network was already strong and very organised on the internet, those actors soon become very loud and present in the debate and particularly prone to echo and use the scientific material that Australian research centres were providing. In the mean time, historical non-scientific actors, mainly associations, NGOs and Tuvalu civil society had to find new grounds for basing their claims to their right to international support and assistance. Some chose not to speak about the causes of their pending disappearance to focus on the emergency of the situations while other have started basing their claims on human right. Only a handful of them kept using scientific studies and data to advocate their position, something that appears very clear when observing the graphs representing the network.
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