The Island Nation That Bought a Back-Up Property
Mikarite Temari, the mayor of Christmas Island, Kiribati’s largest atoll, rolled his eyes and shook his head as I read off my laptop in his office what his president, Anote Tong, had said during a visit to New York.
“According to the science and the projections,” Tong, a slim 62-year-old with a trimmed mustache, a gray crew-cut and a talent for metaphor, told Fareed Zakaria on CNN, “it is already too late for us.” For Kiribati and other nations made up of low-lying atolls, Tong added, “The impact of climate change is about total annihilation.” An interviewer in The New Yorker wrote, “Kiribati’s fate is settled; Tong gives it twenty years.”
“This is not true,” Temari said with visible dismay. “None of it.” Scientists who analyze atoll island dynamics agree that any notion of existential threat for atoll nations is unfounded. Indeed, several studies have shown that the six inches the central Pacific has risen since 1950 has had . The scientists say that the tropical white-sand islands languidly draped around aquamarine lagoons are actually sitting on live coral reefs that will grow as the Pacific rises two to four feet by the end of the century, as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change .
