SNOW PEOPLE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING

A New Home in the World

Paradise almost lost: Maldives seek to buy a new homeland

"The highest land point on the Maldives is only 2.4 metres above sea level."

Read about it here.

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Eat less of this....

Or risk a lot more of this?

HURRICANE GUSTAV HIT CUBA LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB

STORM HIT HAITIANS STARVE ON ROOFTOPS

Alternatively, have a vegetarian teenage daughter and the barrage of guilt-inducing comments every time you sneak the occasional bacon sandwich will reduce your meat intake no end...

But as the above shows, she's right. As always.

BANGLADESH IS SINKING

The facts about climate change in Bangladesh are grim, especially for the some of the poorest people on Earth, the char-dwellers who inhabit river islands made of silt; a strange, precarious space between land and water.

"I wonder how these islanders cope with this shifting terrain; how they can bear to know that the place they are living in today may not exist tomorrow. I want to know because more and more people in Bangladesh will suffer the same lot, as the sea creeps up; and because, in the not so distant future, this may be the fate of humanity worldwide."

"In the next 50 years, 17% of Bangladesh's landmass is sure to go underwater, causing more than 30 million people to become homeless. Those who live further inland will be only slightly better off: the cyclones and floods that are already a feature of the weather will occur more frequently and with greater ferocity. Geological events stimulated by changes in temperature will mean intense pulses of rainfall followed by periods of drought, and a potential collapse of the monsoon cycle itself."

Do read Losing The Ground Beneath Their Feet.

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.