FAREWELL PARADISE: CLIMATE CHANGE PRODUCES NEWLY SUBMERGING NATIONS
Marilyn Hempel
If you like beautiful tropical beaches under gently swaying palm trees, or if you prefer the frozen wonderland of Alaska, then recent reports on global climate change may alarm you.
On the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, home to 11,000 people, waves routinely lap at the doors of coastal homes. Eventually, scientists warn, the tides will grow high enough to submerge the entire nation, a chain of nine coral islands located 620 miles north of Fiji.
Until recently, Tuvalu appeared to be extremely lucky. It sold its internet domain name ".TV" for $50 million, suddenly making it one of the world's wealthiest small island nations. The people of Tuvalu now have paved roads, speed humps and street signs. The capital of Tuvalu is lit by streetlights from one end to the other. Ironically, money cannot save this paradise, for it is about to pay the ultimate price for a changing climate: national extinction. Rising sea levels are gradually inundating Tuvalu.
Last year, the citizens of Tuvalu started looking for a new home, appealing to New Zealand and Australia to accept them en masse as environmental refugees. An additional problem for Tuvalu is overpopulation. Both its population density (1,100 people per sq. mile) and its fertility rate (3.1 TFR) are high. Australian authorities were less than enthusiastic about providing all the necessary shelter and services for 11,000 people (along with their fertility rate), and turned down the appeal. New Zealand has agreed to take a limited number of refugees.
A growing list of island nations, including Kiribati and the Maldives, face a similar future because rising ocean water is beginning to flood their fresh water supplies and crops. It doesn't stop there. In Bangladesh, for example, 20 million people in low-lying areas may become environmental refugees.
The fate of Tuvalu reminds us that the world really is heating up and that global warming is not just a theory. The 1990s were the hottest decade on record. Worldwide, glaciers are in retreat and ocean levels are rising. If current trends persist, Montana's Glacier National Park might well be without glaciers in 30 years. Africa's celebrated snows of Kilimanjaro are melting into history.
In Alaska, rising temperature is not an abstraction. Mean temperatures have risen by 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter since the 1970's, federal officials say. From Fairbanks to the north, wildfires have been burning off and on since mid-May. Global warming means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from slouching and buckling on foundations that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is no longer permanent. On the Kenai Peninsula, a recreation wonderland a few hours' drive from Anchorage, a four-million-acre spruce forest has been killed by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. Government scientists suspect that rising temperatures allowed the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.
While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the senior Alaskan Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling change from rising temperatures than Alaska. Among the consequences, Senator Stevens says, are sagging roads, crumbling villages, dead forests, catastrophic fires and disruption of marine wildlife.
These problems will cost Alaska hundreds of millions of dollars, he said. "Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world," Senator Stevens said.
Even if one doesn't live in Alaska, there are good reasons why the average American should care about global warming. Fourteen of the 20 largest cities and 19 of the 20 most densely populated U.S. counties lie along the coast. Some of these are vulnerable to sea level rise. Census Bureau projections show that more than 27 million additional people will be added to the U.S. coastal zone over the next 15 years. This is an unprecedented population increase within the thin band that borders the sea.
Other potential effects of global warming include the likelihood of more hurricanes, windstorms and droughts, reduced water availability and decreased water quality, greater air pollution, and the loss of large numbers of plant and animal species. Hundreds-of-billions of dollars may have to be spent preventing, delaying, or recovering from the impacts of climate change disasters.
What can we do? For starters, we must stop denying reality. Tuvalu is real. The Earth's temperature is increasing, and we must act to prevent or at least lessen the consequences.
Tuvalu has pleaded with the international community for years to reduce the threat of global warming by cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions. But the tiny country, which contributes virtually nothing to the problem, has had little success.
In a desperate effort for survival, Tuvalu has hired two law firms-one in the United States and another in Australia-to sue those who are largely responsible: the industrialized nations, including the United States. While Tuvalu may not win an undoubtedly lengthy and expensive legal battle, the tiny country will at least draw global attention to a new reality: the plight of newly submerging nations.
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