ENVIRONMENT - More Evidence on Effects of Global Warming

"Sinking Islanders Seek Help at Bali" by Charles J. Hanley, AP

Excerpt

KILU, Papua New Guinea - Squealing pigs lit out for the bush and Filomena Taroa herded the grandkids to higher ground last week when the sea rolled in deeper than anyone had ever seen.

What was happening? "I don't know," the sturdy, barefoot grandmother told a visitor. "I'd never experienced it before."

As scientists warn of rising seas from global warming, more and more reports are coming in from villages like this one on Papua New Guinea's New Britain island of flooding from unprecedented high tides. It's happening not only to low-lying atolls, but to shorelines from Alaska to India.

This week, by boat, bus and jetliner, a handful of villagers are converging on Bali, Indonesia, to seek help from the more than 180 nations gathered at the U.N. climate conference. The coastal dwellers' plight -- once theoretical -- appears all too real in 2007, and is spreading and worsening.

Scientists project that seas expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melting land ice may displace millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide in this century if heat-trapping industrial emissions are not sharply curtailed.

Summarizing the islanders' plight, Ursula Rakova said: "We don't have vehicles, an airport. We're merely victims of what is happening with the industrialized nations emitting 'greenhouse gases.'"

The sands of Rakova's islands, the Carteret atoll northeast of Bougainville island, have been giving way to the sea for 20 years. The saltwater has ruined their taro gardens, a food staple, and has contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands now suffer from chronic hunger.

Of course there are still the nay-sayers, especially the money-worshiping GOP Conservatives, that will say that this has nothing to do with global warming. Or as they put it, "there is no evidence."

These Ostrich-people believe that 6,635,384,828 (and counting) World Population, don't have a meaningful impact on the environment.

They especially ignore the industrialized nations, which are the biggest consumers of resources and producers of pollution.