Posted on 01/05/2005 2:38:25 AM PST by johniegrad
A thin white smile curves across the blank face of the South Pacific Ocean, more than a mile below. A little lower, the whiteness re-solves into an arc of breakers, and the tiny turboprop heads straight for them. Only at the last moment does a filament of land seem to emerge from the ocean. We touch down at Funafuti International Airport, Tuvalu’s only functioning airstrip,interrupting a soccer match on the runway.
The islands of Tuvalu, scattered over 500,000 square miles of equatorial ocean midway between Hawaii and Aus-tralia, appear so wispy and are so low-lying, no more than 15 feet above sea level, that it’s easy to visualize the waves just washing over them. It’s November, cyclone season, and I anxiously scan the area for high ground and finally settle on an unfinished three-story government building. My uneasiness is stoked by dire pronouncements that Tu-valu’s leaders have been making for more than a decade. The planet’s fourth-smallest nation, they say, faces extinction be-cause of climate change. Rising seas and deadly storms have reportedly started to swamp the islands, and fears are growing that Tuvalu will be uninhabitable or may vanish entirely within a few decades. Prime Minister Saufatu Sapo’aga told the United Nations last year that the global-warming threat is no different from “a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.”
Independent scientists also offer a grim forecast. “Because of its location and physical nature, Tuvalu is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change and in particular rising sea level,” concludes a 1996 scientific study coauthored by the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme and the government of Japan.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Tuavalans migrating to En Zed bump.
Talake is part of a growing Tuvaluan community in New Zealand of some 2,000. Affluent Tuvaluans have long trav-eled here for higher education and good healthcare, but today’s newcomers more often pick strawberries for a living. I meet some of them at a church service in an Auckland sub-urb on a gray, blustery Sunday. The Reverend Suamalie Iose-fa smiles broadly. But his face is weary. As a preacher and mental health worker, he deals with problems born of pover-ty and overcrowding, not to mention the shock of social dis-location. “Imagine moving from a nation without a stoplight to a modern city of a million people,” he says. Iosefa thinks New Zealand offers a brighter future than Tuvalu “education-wise, health-wise, and especially because people feel threatened by global warming.”
Acknowledging that threat, New Zealand’s government in 2002 established a new quota program for Pacific Islanders, which allows up to 75 Tuvaluans a year to immigrate. But Iosefa says no more than 21 people were approved in 2003.
As the voices of the men’s and women’s choirs rise in the hall, the stalwart hymns of England take wing on the rich harmonies of Polynesia. Most of the assembled, some 200 adults and children, sit or recline on mats. A quarter of the people in the room have overstayed their visas and face deportation. But Sutema Keakea, who has two young daughters and is 39 weeks pregnant, is among the lucky ones. A bank employee in Tuvalu, she just received approval for permanent residency under the new program. She left Tuvalu to be near other relatives, she says: “People do say they’re afraid of global warming and sea level rise, but I just don’t know.”
On this day, some of the Tuvaluans say they ponder the story of Noah and the Flood for clues to their future. “In Noah,” says one man, “the rainbow was a sign of God’s prom-ise that there won’t ever be another flood again.” But another congregant disagrees. “Sea level will rise because things are different now from the old days,” he says. “The world God created was perfect, but people have made it imperfect.”
Can you ping your list?
“The world God created was perfect, but people have made it imperfect.”
Too true, but that's been true since the Garden of Eden.
Damned Haliburton.....
My advice to Tuvaluans: If a guy driving a wooden boat shows up & wants two people to volunteer to go on a little trip--Go with him.
If Tuvaluans were really concerned about preserving thair islands they should be begging to become a landfill site for the world's refuse... or start dredging the seabed for rocks and sand.
If it disappears...blame it on Bush!....
5 more, no Tuvalu.
I'd leave now, if I lived there.
Oh, BTW, has any evidence (you know, data) been presented in the last four weeks that global warming is not an entirely natural phenomenon? I haven't been paying attention.
So what if sea levels are rising? They have risen and fallen many times in the history of the planet.
Why do you grant the unsupported assumption that THIS TIME, and this time only, man has something to do with it?
The rest of the scientific world is pretty much run by hypothesis, testing, proof, then verification. (or something approximating this)
When it comes to global warming, there are factions that believe, and factions that don't. It's run more like a religion that anything else. If you have faith in global warming, it's real. If you don't, it isn't happening.
When one of these articles gets written, only one side seems to get the call.
funafuti
bump for possible next dog name thread
bttt
,,, so do I. I couldn't get to work yesterday because the highway south was washed out from a rainstorm and it's the height of summer here. A Tuvalaun can take my place in New Zealand under the present dictatorship, no problem at all.
The environmentalist movement has been hijacked by lawyers and their useful idiots. What more do we need to know?
bttt
The residents should be thankful that they got to spend a few generations on such a beautiful, but temporary, bit of paradise.
It will soon make a lovely dive site, and man has no say in that matter.
I hope it does disappear, just so we don't have to listen to the Tuvaluians complain anymore.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.