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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.)


	One of the many trash pits on the island. (Photograph by Matthieu Paley)

BEFORE I LEFT TUVALU, I had ample time to convince myself that global warming is the mother of all scenarios of environmental-and social, and economic-collapse. This is not propaganda: Global temperatures went up by about a degree during the 20th century; in April, an article in the journal Nature suggested that temperatures are likely to rise another 2.3 degrees in the next 20 to 30 years. The largest and most authoritative international body of experts in such matters, the 2,500-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), operating under a joint mandate from the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, has warned that the planet might warm up by as much as 10.8 degrees over the course of the 21st century.

Although the warming and its effects are global, Americans, representing 4.6 percent of the world's population, have plied the atmosphere with about 29 percent of all insulating greenhouse gases emitted by human activity over the last century. Chief among them

"Obviously," says the American assistant to the prime minister, "Tuvaluans are hysterically concerned about climate change. But Tuvalu has no leverage, other than its ability to draw attention to its plight and wake up the world. There's no such thing as bad publicity."

is carbon dioxide, exhaled in great gasps by every car and every furnace and every power plant. Nonetheless, in March 2001, President Bush renounced his predecessor's signature to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, calling the treaty "fatally flawed" and inimical to American economic interests. He refused to commit to reductions in greenhouse-gas spewing so modest that most observers considered them merely a symbolic first step.

"Sea-level rise will cause major disruptions," says Robert T. Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank, who was chair of the IPCC for six years, until the Bush administration, prodded by its friends at ExxonMobil, lobbied vigorously to remove him from the post this year. (He was replaced by Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer from greenhouse-gas-friendly India.) "I believe that the very large majority of scientists-95 percent would be a good number-agree with IPCC findings," Watson told me.

The IPCC's weather forecasts, as laid out in its 2001 Assessment Report, make the Dark Ages look like a Tuvaluan beach party. Droughts will afflict much of the world, with especially nasty thirst in store for the 1.3 billion people, including Tuvaluans, who currently lack adequate access to clean water. On the other hand, the quarter of the world's population that lives in the great river valleys of Asia is apt to find itself treading the waters of deluge due to the rapid retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. Warmer climes will abet the spread of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and of agricultural pests, and of hungry critters like the beetles that have hollowed out 38 million spruce trees in the past few years in Alaska's Chugach National Forest. Even marginally warmer seas will bleach, and then kill, coral reefs, which sustain the greater part of marine biodiversity.



	Two Tuvaluans munch raw fish heads as the sun goes down on Funafti's lagoon. (Photograph by Matthieu Paley)

As in all things, poor parts of the world will cope especially poorly with the changing climate, while the temperate latitudes of the United States will fare more hardily. But that doesn't mean that North America is in the clear. Geoff Jenkins, a climate modeler at the British Meteorological Office, one of the world's leading centers of climate research, says that, on top of the four to eight inches that the world's seas rose during the 20th century, the water, which heats up much more slowly than land, would be saving its best for the foreseeable future and beyond.

"The average projection for the next hundred years is something like half a meter's rise," he told me, though the high end of the estimates verge toward twice that. Even more ominous, the gathering flood will be compounded by its own unstoppable inertia. "Once it gets started," Jenkins added, "no matter what you do about emissions, the ocean almost doesn't notice. The sea level continues rising for many centuries afterwards."

How that affects our weather patterns is tricky. Scientists have only recently begun to discover how abruptly the earth's climate has shifted in the past from hothouse to ice age-which is to say, nature has a fickle mind of its own. But figuring in the last two centuries of fossil-fuel burning, the current forecast is grim: Higher and hotter seas will bear more frequent and savage storms, accompanied by torrential flooding, like the kind that turned Prague into a Kafkaesque water park this summer. New Orleans and New York will have to undertake massive public-works projects to stay dry; Rotterdam and Venice will be lucky to make it. And perpetually forlorn Bangladesh is in for more good times, with 17.5 percent of its land-home to 17 million people and locus of half its food production-in danger of being engulfed.

"You could have a major dislocation in almost all low-lying deltaic areas, whether it be in Bangladesh, or Egypt, or the Pearl River Valley in China," Robert Watson told me. "One could conceivably see tens of millions of people being displaced, leading, potentially, to a large number of environmental refugees in areas where there are already regional conflicts."

And Tuvalu? At an average altitude of six feet above sea level, Tuvalu is apt to be stargazing from the wrong side of the water long before the oceans rise almost two feet. "We are endangered," said Ambassador Sopoaga. "And you know, endangered people can act in desperate ways."

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