"World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said."
Doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? It's just millimeters, right?
The thing that is rarely reported when they mention that figure is... "average" means that some places it's lower, and some places it's higher...
much higher.
"...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."
Just as warming is much higher than average in the Arctic - and causing a host of problems, from melting sea-ice to melting permafrost - the sea level change is higher in some places, like
the island nation of Kiribati.
"For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee...
As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.
On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression."
Another place the rising waters threaten:
Australia's Torres Straights Islands. Here, too, it's the extremes:
"Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck... The couple's son, Sonny, was outside his fibro shack with his five children, watching the monster surf, lashed by north-west winds, rise ever higher. In the commotion, everyone had forgotten that Sedoi, the baby, was still inside. They heard her crying and found her in her cot, covered in sand. Water had surged in after a wave picked up a big wooden pallet and flung it through the front wall...
No one on Murray had ever seen such a high tide before. Other islands in the Torres Strait, which lies between the far north-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, have witnessed similar scenes in recent years. Houses, roads and graveyards have been flooded, and the locals believe they know the reason: climate change."
Something for the rest of us to look forward to...
UPDATE: The Guardian reports that the
Maldives are looking to buy themselves a new homeland.
