The World in 2030

102 The World in 2030
Like many others, I had been exposed for some years
to arguments for and against the phenomenon that is
commonly called ‘global warming’ and although I’d read
a lot of the original scientific evidence for myself, nothing
beats a personal inspection.
I visited Samoa, Tuvalu and several other islands in the
South Pacific. On each island I went into the coastal villages,
sought out the older men and asked if they would be kind
enough to show me their beaches.
Without exception, these village elders pointed out to
sea, sometimes dozens of metres out to sea, and indicated
where the sea level had been when they had been young,
fifty or sixty years before. One of the men on Samoa asked
me to wade out into the surf with him to find a rock, now
submerged, on which he had stood to fish when he was a
child. The transparent, turquoise water was almost up to my
chest before he found the rock and, after he had helped me
clamber up beside him, we turned to look back at the new
shore line. It was at least twenty metres further inland.
Today, most of the beaches on the smaller South Pacific
islands are no more than a metre or two wide and in many
places the sea has encroached onto what were once village
greens. Villagers have had to cut down rain forest to move
their communities further into the interior.
Ocean levels rise for many reasons. Over long cyclic
periods the Earth’s sea levels rise and fall naturally, but there
is no previous record of oceans levels rising at such a rapid
rate 193 as they have in the past half century, and particularly