Islanders seek climate summit help (AP/CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

KILU, Papua New Guinea (AP) -- Squealing pigs lit out for the bush and Filomena Taroa herded the grandkids to higher ground last week when the sea rolled in deeper than anyone had ever seen.

What was happening? "I don't know," the sturdy, barefoot grandmother told a visitor. "I'd never experienced it before."

As scientists warn of rising seas from global warming, more and more reports are coming in from villages like this one on Papua New Guinea's New Britain island of flooding from unprecedented high tides. It's happening not only to low-lying atolls, but to shorelines from Alaska to India.

This week, by boat, bus and jetliner, a handful of villagers are converging on Bali, Indonesia, to seek help from the more than 180 nations gathered at the U.N. climate conference. The coastal dwellers' plight -- once theoretical -- appears all too real in 2007, and is spreading and worsening.

Scientists project that seas expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melting land ice may displace millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide in this century if heat-trapping industrial emissions are not sharply curtailed.
***
more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/04/climate.islands.ap/index.html

Evacuations are already a reality -- not next decade, not next year -- NOW.

[jaksavage]

1. We will act

When California and New York experience this 'Inconvenience'.

[momophile]

2. I'm wondering at what point Tonga is threatened enough

that I need to offer to my Tongan family/friends to come live with us.

is the U.S. prepared to take any global warming refugees?