Contrary to what most skeptics say, there are island nations that know all too well that the sea is encroaching on them. The Maldives an island nation of nearly 1200 islands in the Indian Ocean, and home to almost 386,000 people is the lowest lying nation on earth averaging a mere 7 feet above sea level.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/mv-maldives.
Well, the Maldivians are worried, so much so that officials there held an underwater meeting to bring attention to the crisis island/atoll nations face. Fears are the Maldives will be completely submerged by the end of the century. They also wanted to make the rest of the world realize that they are a “frontline state,” meaning the first but not the last to be affected by rising waters.
I wrote a blog in 2007 about the Kiribati Islands, another island nation nearby the Solomons, that is losing landmass at an alarming rate. The population there is about 100,000. The Kiribati official there thinks his island nation will cease to exist by 2050. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2007/04/the-rest-of-the-world-is-going-green-fast/.
Now consider that between these two small island/atoll nations that very few of us could even locate without looking it all up first (me), there are almost a half a million people that will not just be homeless for the time being, until a war is settled, or someone decent comes into power, but literally without a country. Will the Maldivians change their names? After all there will be no Maldives to show where they come from. The lost city of Atlantis appears a little less incredulous now.
And don’t these experiences from actual people, a great many of them, fly in the face of reports by skeptics like the SPPI website that stated in their July 09, press release: “Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century and has been rising at just 1 ft/century since 1993. Sea level has scarcely risen since 2006. Also, Pacific atolls are not being drowned by the sea, as some have suggested.” Hmm. Maybe they should take a little trip, see elsewhere.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/global_warming_not_catastrophic.html.
Read the articles about the underwater meeting and Maldives concerns:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33354627/ns/world_news-weird_news/.
Tags: Maldives, Sea Levels, SPPI