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 Kilu 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 as well.
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.
A Europe-based research group, the Global Governance Project, will propose at the two-week Bali meeting that an international fund be established to resettle “climate refugees.”
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 the islanders’ taro gardens, contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands suffer from chronic hunger.
A 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found that the seas rose almost 1 inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans, in recent years.
“It turns out the ocean sloshes around,” said the University of Tasmania’s Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. “It’s moving, and so on a regional basis, the ocean’s movement is causing sea-level variations — ups and downs.”
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U.S. still balks at emissions cuts
BALI, Indonesia — U.S. delegates at the United Nations climate conference insisted Monday that they would not be a “roadblock” to a new global agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. But they refused to endorse mandatory emissions cuts, seen by many delegations at the meeting as crucial for reining in rising temperatures.
Faced with melting polar ice and worsening droughts, delegates from nearly 190 nations opened the two-week conference with pleas for a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. That deal required the 36 signatories to cut emissions by 5 percent.
A key goal of the conference is to draw in the U.S., now the sole industrial power to balk at ratifying the Kyoto pact, citing fears that it would hurt the U.S. economy as cuts aren’t required of rising economies such as China. The U.S. was forced to repeatedly defend its refusal to embrace emission caps after Australia’s new leader signed papers Monday — amid hearty applause — to ratify Kyoto, reversing his nation’s previous government.
The Associated Press
