Thursday December 28, 2006, 12:24 pm

The entire article:


Disappearing World: Global Warming Claims Tropical Island
By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent UK

Sunday 24 December 2006

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human Cost of Global Warming: Rising Seas Will Soon Make 70,000 People Homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

Thursday December 28, 2006, 3:16 pm
hard to take in and so many folks homeless! Good post Wolf

Friday December 29, 2006, 12:44 pm
Well, we don't need the Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee becoming the president of the USA. I have not see much from this man for global warming. He is not much on environmental isses at all, in any way.
So Mike Huckabee, I hope you see this and our new governor of Arkansas Mike Beebe for 2007, I hope you can do a better job at addressing environmental issues like stopping the pollution discharging at Macsteel in Fort Smith, Ar. With global warming here, we got to enforce our Clean Water Act NOW! to make sure we have clean water to drink. Global warming is going to cause shortages in some area of the country (Arkansas had drought periods for the last two years) and heavy rains in other area of the world. With rasing water in some parts of the world, the polluted soils and polluted trash will be found and will be floating back out into our face. So stop Quanex Macsteel trash and waste oils discharging that right now is going into a very large park full of children. You can see my web page and see the pollution at

The next governor of Arkansas Mike Beebe has been told about this and more data is coming his way soon.

Saturday December 30, 2006, 10:41 am
As the water's from the northern pole melts, as the water's from the southern pole melts; we have all learned that there will be hard concequences to be met. So it has begun! 70,000 people homeless, where will they go, how will they live? 7,500 acres of land lost to the sea! How do we make up for these losses? Land that used to be there, land that was used for providing income for the 70,000 that are now homeless. There will be theft, there will be murder, there will be anything to help the stranded, homeless people to survive. They are confused, they just want their home's back. They want their lives back! This was not inevitable, something should and could have been done sooner so that the people didn't have to loose their homes and land.
There will be more homeless, there will be more land gone under the sea! Where are the homeless to go to? What are the people to do to earn more income? This is going to go on and on, this is only the begining. Where will the people go?