Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 6 June 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.880
News
"Too late" to save Pacific island nation from submersion
Kiribati's 97,000 citizens face homelessness this century, president warns.
Rising sea levels caused by climate change will force the inhabitants of a group of Pacific coral islands to abandon their homes by the end of the century, their president has declared.
Anote Tong, president of the threatened islands in the Republic of Kiribati, has appealed to the international community to take responsibility for rehousing his compatriots.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
This is odd, because I thought sea levels had been <a href="http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/global/sea_level.html">falling </a>in this part of the world.
As I understand it Kiribati is a collection of atolls. Assuming the sea level is rising why does no one mention the life cycle of atoll? They are made up of coral and or a combination of coral and volcanic material which breaks down over time. Wikipedia says of atolls: "Corals settle and grow around an oceanic island, forming a fringing reef. In favorable conditions, the reef will expand, and the interior island will subside. Eventually the island completely subsides beneath the water, leaving a ring of growing coral with an open lagoon in its center. The process of atoll formation may take as long as 30,000,000 years to occur."
I see busybody politicians being fed garbage by environmental terrorists, and they love it. It is another symptom of human arrogance, to think that only they and the "emissions" consequence of their puny civilization, are the cause of global climate fluctuations. Of course, variations of Solar activity is too small a factor for these fatheads.
Do the math; solar variation cannot account for the changes in temperature, and certainly not the increases in carbon dioxide, that we are measuring. Sea level is rising. If you doubt it, measure it. That's quite easy. The fact that we can all sit on various points on the globe, read this article, and comment on it within seconds to hours, argues very strongly against the use of "puny" to describe current human civilization. It is impressive, it consumes a lot, and it produces a lot, including carbon dioxide in ever increasing amounts. The life cycle of an atoll, which normally occurs on tens to hundreds of millenia, has almost nothing to do with a problem that is occurring on a timescale of decades. The rising level of water around these islands is not being driven by subsidence.