While everyone else debates whether climate change is real or not, whether to call it climate change or global warming, whether it's caused by man or just a natural cycle, and everybody argues over statistics, people in the South Pacific (and other regions) are facing losing their ancestral lands, the only home they have ever known, their culture, their livelihoods, their language, their history, their communities...everything. They are being forced to find somewhere else to live.
And exactly how do you move a country? Can they buy a chunk of land in the middle of Texas and just move onto it and call it their new home, and just resume being a country, there? Would Texas agree to that? Would they agree to a chunk of Texas not being Texas any more? And even if they did, would the US agree to that?
Would any country? You want to see what happens when people decide to move their country, or create a new one on someone else's land? Look at Isreal/Palistine. And how long has that conflict been going on? Do you want to see more of the same in other parts of the world, when the people in these island countries set up shop somewhere else and try to call it home?
And how do they come up with the money to do something like that, any way? Most of these small island countries are quite poor, their people live simple lives and don't own very much, except the sinking land beneath their feet. Do you want to buy a sinking island so they can afford to move off it?
And once some land is bought and paid for, then there is the expense of moving everyone to it. And then the real fun begins...assimilating to life in their new location. Learning new ways to support themselves, dealing with the existing local crime and violence that they didn't have where they originally came from. The people from the Carteret Islands are giving up what was once Paradise, trading it for the perils of the unknown, in a place already torn by civil war.
And as far as outside help, where is that going to come from, when the UN doesn't recognize climate change as a qualification for official refugee status? This means no official international aid to help these small disappearing countries find a new home, people that are in danger as a direct result of the actions of those living in industrialized nations.
So their islands sink, and technically, nobody has to take these people in and all countries have the right to turn them away and tell them to go back home, to a place that doesn't even exist any more.
Over 500,000 people from
Bhola Island in Bangladesh permanently lost their homes when half of the island sank in 2005.
Tuvalu will be gone by 2050. Where will its 10,000 residents go?
The Carteret Islands will be fully submerged within the next few years. There are still people living there that need to move.
It's not just science or statistics, or the lifestyle of people in industrialized nations that we are talking about...it's other people,
their way of life, and
their human rights that we are talking about.
Maybe this will make the issue more real, easier to understand:
The human race needs to stop arguing about stuff that really doesn't matter and figure this crap out, fast, because there is a lot at stake here and we are running out of time. This problem needs to be solved, and it doesn't matter if it is solved with science or pure human compassion, as long as it gets solved.
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