Meanwhile, some Tuvaluans are getting ready to abandon their homeland. In fact, Tuvalu threatened in 2002 to sue the United States and Australia for excessive carbon dioxide emissions. In that sense, my habit of leaving lights on around my house, in Washington, D.C., a neighbor’s of constantly driving his large SUV to go just a few city blocks and another neighbor’s preference for a toasty house in winter would play a role in Tuvalu’s fate. Unlike other current or predicted environmental catastrophes, Tuvalu’s problem is one that people worldwide are believed to create by burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. “Because of its location and physical nature, Tuvalu is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change and in particular rising sea level,” concludes a 1996 scientific study coauthored by the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme and the government of Japan.
Prime Minister Saufatu Sapo’aga told the United Nations last year that the global-warming threat is no different from “a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.” Independent scientists also offer a grim forecast. Rising seas and deadly storms have reportedly started to swamp the islands, and fears are growing that Tuvalu will be uninhabitable or may vanish entirely within a few decades. The planet’s fourth-smallest nation, they say, faces extinction because of climate change. My uneasiness is stoked by dire pronouncements that Tuvalu’s leaders have been making for more than a decade. It’s November, cyclone season, and I anxiously scan the area for high ground and finally settle on an unfinished three-story government building.
The islands of Tuvalu, scattered over 500,000 square miles of equatorial ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, appear so wispy and are so low-lying, no more than 15 feet above sea level, that it’s easy to visualize the waves just washing over them. We touch down at Funafuti International Airport, Tuvalu’s only functioning airstrip, interrupting a soccer match on the runway. Only at the last moment does a filament of land seem to emerge from the ocean. Alittle lower, the whiteness resolves into an arc of breakers, and the tiny turboprop heads straight for them. A thin white smile curves across the blank face of the South Pacific Ocean, more than a mile below.
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