MONTREAL (Reuters) - 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 U.N. report said on Monday.
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 600 yards (meters) inland.
"They could no longer live on the coast," Taito Nakalevu, a climate change expert at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, told Reuters during a 189-nation conference in Montreal on ways to fight climate change.
So-called "king tides," often whipped up by cyclones, had become stronger in recent years and made Lateu uninhabitable by flooding the village 4 to 5 times a year. "We are seeing king tides across the region flooding islands," he said.
The scientific panel that advises the United Nations projects that seas could rise by almost 3 feet (a meter) by 2100 because of melting icecaps and warming linked to a build-up of heat-trapping gases emitted by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and autos.
Many other coastal communities are vulnerable to rising seas, such as the U.S. city of New Orleans, the Italian city of Venice or settlements in the Arctic where a thawing of sea ice has exposed coasts to erosion by the waves.
Huh.
They don't bother to mention that New Orleans and Venice are already below sea-level. I guess they don't want to confuse people with the facts.
You know what that means !
2.8 MB Windows Media Viewer
Actual footage of Global Warming attacking the innocent villagers !
Follow Up 12/09/2005:Climatologist Rejects 'Global Warming' as Cause for Island Evacuation
"It would seem that [the Reuters article] about the combination of sea level rise and increased storminess causing people to evacuate (to the island's interior) isn't based upon much real data," Michaels told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday.
The Reuters article included a statement from the U.N.'s Environment Program claiming that the residents of Vanuatu had "become one of, if not the first, to be formally moved out of harm's way as a result of climate change." However, the report did not feature any scientists or experts questioning the conclusion that human-caused "global warming" was to blame for the residents' coastal retreat.
Michaels said the scientific data does not back up the claims in the Reuters article about the evacuation of Vanuatu being linked to the U.N.'s projections of melting icecaps and rising sea levels.
"The island in question has experienced no net sea level rise in the last half century, according to the combined satellite and submarine data," Michaels said. "In fact, areas to the west such as [the island of] Tuvalu show substantial declines in sea level over that period," he added.
Michaels added that "the United Nations intergovernmental panel notes a decline in the frequency of tropical storms and hurricanes in the South Pacific in recent decades.
"With sea level not showing a rise and the decline in the frequency of tropical cyclones, it's very hard to make the strident statements that were made in the [Reuters article,]" he added.
"Reuters has generally been very radical on 'global warming.' This is nothing new for them," he said, noting that in much of the media, "the appropriate level of journalistic cynicism does not apply to 'global warming.'"
Reuters and the MSM never let facts get in the way of a good story. Especially when they can blame the evil US for the "crime". Come on people, think... would sea levels rise only around one stinking island ? Does that make sense to anyone ?
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