For more than 30 years the 980 people living on the six minute horseshoe-shaped Carteret atolls have battled the Pacific to stop salt water destroying their coconut palms and waves crashing over their houses. They failed.
Yesterday a decision was made that will make their group of low-lying islands literally go down in history. In the week before 150 countries meet in Montreal to discuss how to combat global warming and rising sea levels, the Carterets’ people became the first to be officially evacuated because of climate change.
Starting as soon as money is available to the Papuan New Guinean regional government, 10 families at a time will be moved by the authorities to Bougainville, a larger island 62 miles away. Within two years the six Carterets, roughly the size of 80 football pitches and just 1.5 metres high, will be uninhabited and undefended. By 2015 they are likely to be completely submerged.
US is now preparing to relocate several Inuit villages at a projected cost of $100 million or more for each one.
“First climate change refugees”
What kind of crap is that? This has nothing to do with climate change; the island was never inhabitable. Let’s see, salt water intrusion kept trees and crops from growing? Well duh! That island cannot possibly have a stable fresh-water ground table. Dig down 1.5 meters and what do you hit? The ocean.
And it doesn’t take a category 5 hurricane or typhoon to create a 1.5-meter storm surge.
And since when has coastal erosion been proof of global warming?
And they call Bush a liar!
The thing with climate change is that people take political sides about whether it happens or not. Deniers refuse to see us as a cause and in their views, the whole thing is bullcrap, while eco-activist blame us for every natural disasters.
The debate is pointless. We should concentrate on what might happen in a few years in case many of the world’s scientist were right.
I’m sorry to be an ass and all, but Holland has had this problem for years, but has also had a solution in place. It has something to do with Ellen DeGeneres…
The planet is in constant change: It heats, it cools, water goes up, water goes down. We’re not doing anything to the planet, the planet is doing something to us. If we don’t like it then we need to find ways to cope with it, not try to change something that is so much greater than us we do not fully understand it.
I love watching all these morons burying their head in the sand. The fact is so long as it’s only little brown people thousands of miles away, they’re going to keep sipping their beer and enjoying their cable or adsl and ranting and raving from their armchairs. One day (it may be ten years, it may be even forty), when the waters are lapping at their door, or – heaven forbid – the displaced people are knocking on it, the look on their face will be absolutely priceless.
First of all Holland is a BAD example (so would New Orleans). Pacific Islands that have been inhabited for thousands of years are not comparable. Regardless of what you believe about global warming and climate change, you cannot deny that after thousands of years of relative stability living there, hundreds of Pacific Islands are about to be swamped. The cause is irrelevant, the politics debatable, the scientific FACT is irrefutable. Pacific nations like Australia and New Zealand are putting contingency plans to bed NOW for how to deal with the refugees when they arrive. Government ministers are not treating it as a case of “if”, but “when”. They fully accept the possibility that these people may have to be naturalised as citizens in Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific rim States.
So how on earth should it matter whether you believe you’re right when you say it’s not humans, and it’s not global warming. The problem is REAL, and if you don’t have anything positive in terms of contributing to a solution, you should probably just put your head back in the sand and continue to be antisocial.