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KILU, Papua New Guinea (AP) -- 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 this one 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.
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 their taro gardens, a food staple, and has
contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands
now suffer from chronic hunger.
The national government has appropriated $800,000 to resettle a few
Carteret families on Bougainville, out of 3,000 islanders.
"That's not enough," Rakova told The Associated Press in Papua New
Guinea's capital, Port Moresby. "The islands are getting smaller.
Basically, everybody will have to leave."
In a landmark series of reports this year, the U.N. climate-science
network reported seas rose by a global average of about 0.12 inches
annually from 1993 to 2003, as compared with about 0.08 inches
annually for the period 1961-2003.
But a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much
higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific
and Indian oceans.
"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."
Regional temperatures and atmospheric conditions, currents, undersea
and shoreline topography are all factors contributing to sea levels.
On some atolls, which are the above-water remnants of ancient
volcanoes, the coral underpinnings are subsiding and adding to the
sinking effect.
The oceanic "sloshing" is steadily taking land from such western
Pacific island nations as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
In Papua New Guinea, reports have trickled in this year of fast-
encroaching tides on shorelines of the northern island province of
Manus, the mainland peninsular village of Malasiga and the Duke of
York Islands off New Britain.
International media attention paid to the Carteret Islands, the best-
known case, seems to have drawn out others, said Papua New Guinea's
senior climatologist, Kasis Inape.
"Most of the low-lying islands and atolls are in the same situation,"
Inape said in Port Moresby.
Here in Kilu on the Bismarck Sea, on a brilliant blue bay ringed by
smoldering volcanoes, swaying coconut palms and thin-walled homes on
stilts, the invading waves last year forced some villagers to move
their houses inland 20 or more yards -- taking along their pigs,
chickens and fears of worse to come.
It did, on November 25, when the highest waters yet sent them
scurrying.
"We think the sea is rising," said 20-year-old villager Joe Balele.
"We don't know why."
The scene is repeated on shores across the Pacific, most tragically on
tiny island territories with no "inland" to turn to.
Preparing to head to Bali to present her people's case on Tuesday at
the U.N. climate conference, Rakova searched for words to explain what
was happening back home.
"Our people have been there 300 or 400 years," she said. "We'll be
moving away from the islands we were born in and grew up in. We'll
have to give up our identity."
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 this one 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.
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 their taro gardens, a food staple, and has
contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands
now suffer from chronic hunger.
The national government has appropriated $800,000 to resettle a few
Carteret families on Bougainville, out of 3,000 islanders.
"That's not enough," Rakova told The Associated Press in Papua New
Guinea's capital, Port Moresby. "The islands are getting smaller.
Basically, everybody will have to leave."
In a landmark series of reports this year, the U.N. climate-science
network reported seas rose by a global average of about 0.12 inches
annually from 1993 to 2003, as compared with about 0.08 inches
annually for the period 1961-2003.
But a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much
higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific
and Indian oceans.
"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."
Regional temperatures and atmospheric conditions, currents, undersea
and shoreline topography are all factors contributing to sea levels.
On some atolls, which are the above-water remnants of ancient
volcanoes, the coral underpinnings are subsiding and adding to the
sinking effect.
The oceanic "sloshing" is steadily taking land from such western
Pacific island nations as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
In Papua New Guinea, reports have trickled in this year of fast-
encroaching tides on shorelines of the northern island province of
Manus, the mainland peninsular village of Malasiga and the Duke of
York Islands off New Britain.
International media attention paid to the Carteret Islands, the best-
known case, seems to have drawn out others, said Papua New Guinea's
senior climatologist, Kasis Inape.
"Most of the low-lying islands and atolls are in the same situation,"
Inape said in Port Moresby.
Here in Kilu on the Bismarck Sea, on a brilliant blue bay ringed by
smoldering volcanoes, swaying coconut palms and thin-walled homes on
stilts, the invading waves last year forced some villagers to move
their houses inland 20 or more yards -- taking along their pigs,
chickens and fears of worse to come.
It did, on November 25, when the highest waters yet sent them
scurrying.
"We think the sea is rising," said 20-year-old villager Joe Balele.
"We don't know why."
The scene is repeated on shores across the Pacific, most tragically on
tiny island territories with no "inland" to turn to.
Preparing to head to Bali to present her people's case on Tuesday at
the U.N. climate conference, Rakova searched for words to explain what
was happening back home.
"Our people have been there 300 or 400 years," she said. "We'll be
moving away from the islands we were born in and grew up in. We'll
have to give up our identity."