HONOLULU -- It's too late for Tuvalu, a small island nation in the Pacific. Ten thousand people, Tuvalu's entire population, are packing their bags as their homes among nine low-level atolls are being swallowed by the rising sea. These are the facts of life: The Earth is warming, sea levels are rising, and Tuvalu is quietly being erased from the surface of the Earth.
Leo Falcam, president of the Federated States of Micronesia, made an impassioned plea to senior policy leaders in Hawaii last week to create policies that will curb global warming. He cautioned that the Pacific Islanders' "early experience with real consequences of global warming has been considered analogous to the canary in the coal mine -- providing an early warning to the global community of its own impending doom."
The Tuvalu islands are only the first casualties of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, predicts a 50-cm to 1-meter rise in sea levels over the next century. A rise of 1 meter would place 17.5 percent of Bangladesh, 6 percent of the Netherlands, and 80 percent of Atoll Majuro of the Marshall Islands under water, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCC. Low-lying coastal zones of developed countries and small islands could also be seriously effected. While some holdouts challenge the IPCC, it represents a comprehensive and authoritative group of more than 1,000 experts and the overwhelming majority opinion.