RISING seas have forced 100 people on a Pacific island to move to higher ground in what may be the first example of a village formally displaced because of modern global warming, a UN report has said.Or is it just sinking?
With coconut palms on the coast already standing in water, inhabitants in the Lateu settlement on Tegua Island in Vanuatu started dismantling their wooden homes in August and moved about 548.64m inland.
"They could no longer live on the coast," Taito Nakalevu, a climate change expert at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program.
It was unknown if the coral base of the island, about 31sq km, might be subsiding.A number of Pacific islands have been playing the global warming victim game for some time now, aided and abetted by the UN.
So is the island swamping or sinking? It would be easy to find out by placing relatively cheap global satellite monitoring equipment there for a year. But one wouldn't want to uncover scientific fact when fiction is much more profitable.
Meanwhile, there's always a relatively low tech way of sorting this out.
Water always finds its own level. Have the beaches been shrinking near you?
-- Nick
(And erosion doesn't count!)
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