The Good Lord Willin' and the Creek Don't Rise

I've been watching various news videos of the Arctic storm currently pummeling the West Coast, and must admit to being completely amazed at what I've seen. If the Pacific Northwest, California and Nevada were third world countries, or below-sea-level first world areas like New Orleans and the other Gulf Coast sites devastated by Katrina, we'd be seeing quite a few climate refugees emerging from this storm after the third wave finishes its damage late tomorrow. This is hardly a normal winter storm event, record-breaking as it may end up, even in a winter outstanding for snow, ice and wind storms across the country.

I'm thinking about climate refugees again because of an article sent to me during the past week by my TBV co-blogger FD Tate. The article recounts the departure of the first boatload of Carteret Islanders from their island home to start a new life on the 53-mile-distant much larger island of Bougainville. The Carterets are a tiny Melanesian atoll, a part of Papua New Guinea, made up of the protruding rims of an undersea prehistoric volcano. This island "paradise" and its 2000 plus inhabitants has been disappearing for the past two years, houses and gardens washed away or destroyed, fruit trees devastated or killed by the rising seawater and tidal surges that have actually cut one of these islands in half. The atoll is forecast to be completely submerged by 2015. There seems to be some degree of denial that what is happening to these Pacific islands is being caused by climate change, as there are those who attribute it to underwater volcanic activity or even, in strident blame-the-victim mode, to actions taken in past years by the islanders themselves.

Several articles on the subject call the islanders the world's first climate refugees, an honor that I think may more properly belong to those in diaspora from the Gulf coast of the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina. It's a moot point however you look at it, really, and the current climate refugees will soon be joined by many others:

Much of Kiribati, the Marshalls and other low-lying island groups might only be visible through a glass-bottomed boat in decades to come.

Two uninhabited Kiribati islands, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater in 1999, according to the South Pacific regional environment programme.

In 2003 the government of Tuvalu said it would start evacuating its citizens in the face of climate change and rising sea levels, but plans have been tied up in red tape.

According to the Red Cross, the number of people in the Oceania region affected by weather-related disasters has soared by 65 times during the past 30 years. Increased numbers of cyclones, droughts and floods, all predicted by climate change scientists, are said to be making life unviable on many islands. Rising sea levels entirely swamping the islands is the last act of a long, perhaps unstoppable process. (Pacific Atlantis: first climate change refugees).

Watching the footage of this western storm today I can see how utterly at the mercy of the forces of wind and water we puny humans are. The ice that paralyzed Oklahoma and Missouri several weeks ago, the hurricane force winds that toppled giant trucks on California highways today, are these the first acts of this long, perhaps unstoppable process, here in our pampered world? I think they are clearly wake up calls that we ignore at real peril.

Technorati Tags: Carteret Islands, climate change, climate refugees, Katrina, Pacific storms, Papua New Guinea

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