Global warming claims tropical island
In the UK in today’s Independent Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island.
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.
Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.
The vanishing of this island made the news in In Calcutta a few months ago where The Telegraph relates:
Officials of the Bengal government, however, say the study cannot directly be linked to climate change. Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels.
He argued that people displaced by rising sea levels — the envirogees — couldn’t be called refugees in the first place. According to him, most of them are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who settled on these islands decades ago.
So it’s not rising sea levels, a measurable fact, but erosion that’s causing it. I find it hard to imagine that rising sea level have helped the situation however. Also it seems that because the people being flooded out are illegal immigrants, not actually refugees, it’s all okay. Technically the island wasn’t actually inhabited at all. Phew; nothing to see here folks, move along… — DS
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