We Say 3

An update on climate change research findings and guesses as they affect the future of the Pacific Islands is always food for thought. The latest fare from the Climate Impact Group, an arm of Australia's highly regarded government research agency, the CSIRO, is completely unpalatable.

The group predicts rising temperatures, more frequent droughts and the warming of the oceans caused by global climate change. The gloomy report is said to be the most comprehensive guide to the science of climate change in the southern hemisphere. Dr Barry Pittock, the group's former head, in a Radio Australia interview, confirmed that sea level rise is the immediate problem for many Pacific islands countries.

The group goes along with estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of an 8 to 88-centimetre rise in the sea level by 2100 and about half of that by 2050.

That doesn't sound much, but it is about half a metre by 2100 and possibly nearly a metre. This is a bad outlook in regions where cyclones or bad storms cause local storm surges capable of inflicting serious damage to low atolls and shorelines, including large towns and cities.

The report suggests that fisheries and tourism will be losers since warmer water causes coral reef bleaching. If there is repeated bleaching, which is likely, coral reefs could die.

A combination of storm surges and bleaching could devastate reef fisheries and accelerate coastal erosion. Since the third IPCC assessment in 2001, 400 to 500 new references support the conclusions published then. According to Pittock, the fairly clear message is that to stop the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations there must be a global reduction of about 50 percent by about 2050.

As he puts it: "Now that's a very big ask and it can only be achieved by international co-operation." Along with other countries alarmed by what climate change and sea level rise predictions imply for them, the Pacific Islands have been asking the big ask for a decade. Except for European Union countries, the response to the protest clamour from the world's great climate polluters has generally been to sidestep, prevaricate, dodge, sabotage, obstruct, make excuses or to display open hostility to the notion that they have a duty to clean their acts up.

They don't want to clean their acts up because it would cost a lot and impact on their comfortable, and for some, even hedonistic lifestyles.

Not a day now passes with warnings and threats from the White House in Washington blared globally as part of a campaign to deter bomb and bullet terrorism.

Seen from the level, the very low level, of the Pacific Islands, who are the worst climate terrorists? They are United States, ever more closely followed, as they massively stoke up energy for expanding their industrial output, by China and India.

The number one climate terrorist is one George Bush, whose policies since day one of his presidency have leaned heavily in favour of the oil and industrial lobbies whose cozy halls of business he hails from.

But there is hope. According to The Economist, a British magazine, the oil age is ending. In the next 10 to 20 years, oil is likely to give way to technologies that will enable cars, now the worst atmosphere polluters, to run cleanly on hydrogen in place of petrol. That's an outlook Pacific Islanders can take comfort from as they crank their clattering generators to life and rev up their outboards to fume across their lagoons.