It's not anything to do with us, silly...

The majority of the British public doesn't believe that climate change is caused by humans - and many others think scientists are exaggerating the problem.

Yet a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change. Drastic action, they said, was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

'The scientific evidence for climate change is clear and it is down to human activities. It is already affecting people's lives - and the impact will be much greater if we don't act now.' So says the Department for the Environment. But what would they know?
Read the full article here.

Kiribati's King Tide on Youtube

Click here to watch the desperate plight of the islanders of Kiribati as the sea rises and surges to their doors in a King Tide....

(Just ignore the stupid comments section.)

Kiribati's 11th Hour?

"We may be beyond redemption," said President Tong. "We may be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, to produce a sea level change so in time our small, low-lying islands will be submerged."

Kiribati – a former British colony called the Gilbert Islands – is home to 97,000 people, most of them squeezed into the densely populated main atoll, Tarawa, a chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Along with other low-lying Pacific island nations such as Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu, it is regarded as one of the places most vulnerable to climate change.

President Tong, a London School of Economics graduate, said emigration needed to start immediately: "We don't want to believe this, and our people don't want to believe this. It gives us a deep sense of frustration. What do we do?"


Kiribati was my inspiration for Mara's drowning island in EXODUS. I first read about the Kiribati islands in 1999. Almost a decade on, we, the outside world still have done nothing to help.

Read the full story here and here, and about how I was inspired by the Kiribati islanders here.

I've been so imaginatively involved with Kiribati's plight, all through the writing of my trilogy. They are part of the talks I do in schools and at festivals but I wish I could do something more than talk. I will think about what that might be. Ideas welcome.