Few have heard of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, but its people may be the first known casualties of our smokestack- and tailpipe-induced heat wave. The country's 11,000 inhabitants could be the first of thousands, then millions, of climate-change refugees.

Here's why Tuvalu is probably doomed: A century of fossil fuel burning by industrialized nations has dramatically increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, causing additional heat from the sun to be trapped, just like inside a hothouse. This heightened greenhouse effect melted glacial ice and also thermally expanded ocean waters (H20 takes up more space when warm), pushing sea levels higher on Tuvalu by about a foot.

Rising tides caused salt intrusion, poisoning the country's water and crops. Storm surges are making the island nation unlivable (though over-development and overpopulation added to the problem).

But Tuvalu's plight was ignored. In 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore refused to meet with Tuvalu Prime Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu and hear his plea for U.S. support of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. treaty to slow global warming. Since then, the United States hasn't budged on its refusal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, George W. Bush's plan for voluntary corporate fossil fuel cutbacks plays a numbers game worthy of Enron or WorldCom, and actually allows increased emissions.

Granted, the U.S isn't the only contributor to Tuvalu's demise. Other industrial nations are responsible for 22 percent of all carbon emissions, while all developing countries contribute 41 percent. Still, it seems reasonable for the U.S., as the world's only superpower and the worst carbon polluter at 23 percent, to lead the race to cut fossil fuel use and promote sustainable energy resources like wind and solar power.

Instead, at the Sustainability Summit the U.S. firmly opposed proposals by the European Union to achieve a 15 percent level of renewable energy use by 2010, as well as Brazil's plan for a 10 percent renewable energy target of 2012. The summit's final agreement pleased the U.S., but lacks teeth. It drops Europe's insistence on firm targets, percentages and dates for the use of renewable energy.

For Tuvalu, all these proposals are too little too late. In summer 2001, the 11,000 islanders surrendered themselves to a gradual full evacuation of their country. Within 50 to 100 years, Tuvalu's nine Pacific atolls will likely be engulfed by the sea, the first nation to die of global warming.

As Tuvalu acknowledged its fate last summer, government official Paani Laupepa bitterly criticized the United States. "By refusing to ratify the [Kyoto] Protocol, the U.S. has effectively denied future generations of Tuvaluans their fundamental freedom to live where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years." Gone will be homes, schools, burial grounds and churches. All that will remain is a memory of a lost homeland and of an America that refused to help.

Before long, others may decry the U.S. and its steadfast support of the fossil fuel economy. Already, the Maldives Islands, another Pacific nation and a largely Islamic one, has appealed to the U.N. We are an "endangered nation," declared Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. In this century, if IPCC predictions of a one-meter ocean rise are accurate, the Maldives will drown and its 311,000 people will become eco-refugees.

Half the rice land in Bangladesh could also be submerged, compelling mass migrations. In a nation of 134 million, one wonders where the millions of refugees who live in the endangered coastal wetlands will flee to, and what they'll eat when they get there.

As oceans rise along China's coasts, up to 70 million people could be vulnerable to a 100-year-storm surge, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Who will offer new homelands to those made homeless by climate change?

As the flood of eco-refugees rises, so could political tension. Developed nations may face demands for reparations or forgiveness of debts from those nations damaged or destroyed by global warming.

We need only look at the plight of the Palestinians to see the violence bred of a people wrenched from hearth and home. A question Americans should be asking now is: What country will bear the brunt of rage expressed by peoples disenfranchised by climate change?

The answer may lie in a statement written just before 9/11, and signed by more than 100 Nobel Prize winners including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix). Here is what they said:

"The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor."

These words barely made a blip in the U.S. media. But they could point to a coming global apocalypse.

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