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The Sinking Islands of Kiribati
By Nick on July 27, 2008
As an ESL teacher for ten years, I’ve gone through a lot of textbooks. Perhaps one of the most memorable articles I covered in an advanced level textbook was about the sinking islands of Kiribati.
Kiribati is a series of 32 atolls and one island in the tropical center of the Pacific Ocean. This picture shows Christmas Island.
Kiribati is home to over 100,000 people, but what you can see in the pictures above and below, is that the land they live on is sinking!
Rising sea levels are clearly the cause of the Kiribati’s plight, but it’s still uncertain whether or not CO² is responsible for global warming. In fact, rocket scientist and former carbon accountant for Australia’s Greenhouse Office has reversed his position, now arguing that CO² is only a minor cause of global warming.
If CO² is not the main cause of global warming, what can be done to save Kiribati? Despite a 2007 article in TIME magazine blindly labeling CO² as the cause, one researcher admitted,
You could cut off all CO² outputs and sea levels will continue to rise [for a century or more], because the oceans respond slowly to atmospheric change.
In that case, we are about to see the loss of “paradise on Earth”.
Learn more about Kiribati
Posted in World | 3 Comments
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3 Responses to “The Sinking Islands of Kiribati”
Comments
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Mark Ramsay, globetrotting from an armchair in England.
7:38 pm on July 27th, 2008
I enjoyed te article, Nick, but it does seem we are wasting our time saving on CO2 emmissions
7:42 pm on July 27th, 2008
Hey Nick, i did not know that the islands were sinking but that has come to no surprise to me as i have heard that parts of the uk are sinking aswell, I think it is possibly to do with rising sea levels caused partly by the melting glaziers in the artic and in the antartic, but i may be wrong.
3:42 pm on August 16th, 2008
[...] few disgruntled, man-eating dinosaurs, that island would be paradise on Earth, well, at least after Kiribati has [...]