Countries at Risk Lend Nervous Ear to Climate-Change Debate

When you live in Tuvalu, a nation of nine coral atolls strewn like petals across the South Pacific, there’s nothing abstract about global warming or recent changes in the weather. The government there is exploring whether to buy land in another country, in case rising seas or storms force evacuation of the entire 10,000-member population.

Teleke P. Lauti, Tuvalu’s assistant minister of natural resources and environment, made the long flight to Western Europe to beg the rest of the world to take into account the fate of his country, whose total landmass is only one-seventh of that of Washington, D.C.

“Our islands are very low-lying,” Lauti said here at the U.N. conference on climate change. “When a cyclone hits us, there is no place to escape. We cannot climb any mountains or move away to take refuge. It is hard to describe the effects of a cyclonic storm surge when it washes right across our islands. I would not want to wish this experience on anyone.”

As the delegates gathered in The Hague continued to argue Friday over how to slash the emissions of carbon monoxide and other gases heating the Earth’s atmosphere, they were being nervously watched by people whose homes, from Arctic regions to the South Seas, are threatened by changes in the world’s weather.

“My country is the worst here!” Tooker Gomberg, 45, a Canadian, blurted out in the conference’s media center. Gomberg said warming weather was endangering the habitat and food supply of polar bears in his country’s far north. As curious reporters gathered round, he burned his passport to protest what he said was the Canadian government’s overly tolerant attitude toward “greenhouse-gas” pollution.

“The Arctic will be no more, unless the delegates take action,” warned Gomberg, a freelance photographer and unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Toronto. “Forty percent of the ice has already melted,” he said.

The role of man-made gases in transforming the world’s climate and triggering violent weather patterns, such as the periodic Pacific Ocean current changes known as El Nino, is still a subject of intense debate. But according to studies by long-range forecasters of the British Meteorological Office, there is no doubt that the Earth’s atmosphere and seas have heated up by an average 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century, or that this has led to a rise in ocean levels.

Geoff Jenkins, one of the British forecasters, said the best guess was that global temperatures would increase by another 4 1/2 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming century, unless countries take drastic measures to halt their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. That temperature increase would mean a rise in the ocean level of at least 18 to 19 inches, as more of the glaciers and snow masses on land melted away.

The potential human costs could be catastrophic. According to the government of Bangladesh, the world’s most densely populated country, a 3.3-foot increase in the waters of the Bay of Bengal would flood 17.5% of the nation’s territory and leave 17 million people without shelter.

The Hague conference, which is supposed to end today, was deadlocked Friday, with European representatives and environmentalists branding a compromise proposal floated by the Dutch chairman as a cave-in to U.S. pressure, and the chief of the American delegation, Undersecretary of State Frank Loy, countering that he was “deeply disappointed” at such an “unacceptably imbalanced” package.

A U.S. official predicted that the end result would be a declaration of intent largely devoid of specifics--for instance, how much of a reduction in actual greenhouse-gas emissions each country would have to make versus its ability to earn credits through other actions, such as planting trees. Conference spokesman Michael Williams seemed to buttress that view, telling reporters Friday evening that the goal had become to produce a “convincing political document.”

For delegates from many nations on the front lines of climate change, the deadlock seemed to stem from big, rich countries insisting on the right of their industries and automobiles to pollute even as inhabitants of smaller, poorer countries were menaced by flood, drought, rising waters and other natural calamities.

“It gets so intense that at times, you just want to throw something,” said Yumie Crisostomo, representative of the Marshall Islands, a Pacific archipelago of about 1,200 islands whose average elevation is 6 feet above sea level.

Joseph Konno, 45, a native of Chuuk, formerly Truk, in another island group, the Federated States of Micronesia, said the rising waters of the western Pacific had gobbled up 30 feet of the beach where he used to swim and fish as a boy.

Two years ago, a drought without precedent in modern times parched the former U.S. trusteeship scattered across more than 1 million miles of ocean, with rainfall plummeting by up to 95%. Islanders’ staple crops, breadfruit and taro, withered and died, and rice to stave off mass hunger had to be imported from California.

Tuna, the No. 1 export, has also become sparser recently in waters of the country’s economic zone, a phenomenon blamed by Konno, Micronesia’s envoy to the conference, on the growing intensity of El Nino.

“If people don’t believe in climate change, maybe they should take a week away from their offices and come out to the Pacific,” Konno said.

The visiting president of Costa Rica, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, also linked global warming to deadly Hurricane Mitch, which roared across Central America two years ago. The storm killed about 10,000 people and sent 160,000 refugees from Nicaragua and Honduras into Costa Rica, Rodriguez said.

“We’re all losers if we don’t take effective and adequate measures to protect the climate,” the Costa Rican leader said, in a plea for concerted worldwide action.

According to Jenkins of the British Meteorological Office, there is no solid scientific proof--not yet anyway--to link recent devastating storms like Mitch to global warming.

Inhabitants of some of the most vulnerable nations are plainly infuriated at such detachment, which contrasts with what they see and have been living through. Crisostomo, 28, an employee of the Environment Ministry in her native Marshalls, recently took a tour of many of the islands and found widespread coral bleaching due to rising seawater temperatures that she attributes to El Nino.

The fallout could be doubly disastrous. Dying reefs could endanger the islanders’ food supply because fish like to shelter there. But damaged coral atolls could also put lives in the Marshalls at risk because the halo-shaped reefs act as a natural breakwater against the waves whipped up by violent storms at sea.

“It’s not that we are going to be affected tomorrow” by global warming, Crisostomo said. “We were affected yesterday, and we’re being affected today.”