If you're lucky, you meet Amatlain Kabua, a Marshallese princess, former ambassador to the United Nations, and daughter of this country's first president. And you take in the sweet smell of the ocean - all brine and crab and palm frond. You feel the thick air, warm silk on your skin. You see sand piled up along the road, as if pleading with the ocean to stay back. There you see the broken sea wall, crumbled by floods that, in recent years, covered the runways and shut down the airport temporarily. Many coral atolls in the remote Pacific just barely peek out above sea level, making them particularly vulnerable to climate change. It's quite another thing, however, to walk down the tarmac in Majuro. As if an entire country, culture, history and language are logical externalities of our fossil fuel addiction. But because he says this stuff so often - and I hear this stuff so often - that it almost starts to seem expected. Scientists say we easily could warm the atmosphere by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century - and if you call up a scientist like Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics from Germany's Potsdam University, he'll say ominous things like this: "Even limiting warming to 2 degrees, in my view, will still commit some island nations and coastal cities to drowning." In other words: See ya, Marshall Islands. But it could happen within our lifetimes, and certainly within the next generation's. That's not an immediate prospect - definitely not five years or 10. Kiribati, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands.Īll of these barely peek out over the surface of the ocean.Īnd all of them literally could be wiped off the map. But Alice Thomas, from Refugees International, drew my attention to low-lying island nations that could vanish if seas rise as much as 1 or 2 meters. There are countries like Bangladesh where millions likely will be displaced by rising seas. More than 11,000 voted in a poll that commissioned this story.Īs the results came in, I started searching for a suitable case study. That idea came in the form of a question from Kelly, a 48-year-old reader in San Jose, California, who asked, "What happens if thousands or tens of thousands are displaced due to rising sea levels or desertification? Where do they go?" I embarked on this journey to the middle of nowhere because CNN readers voted for me to look into "climate refugees" as part of my Two° series on climate change. No wonder this place is at risk for climate change. But none of it prepared me for the sight of this tiny little atoll - this coke-line of sand and palm - tossed out in the middle of the terrifying sea. I'd read plenty about the Marshall Islands before hopping on a plane in Atlanta 31 hours earlier. Majuro appeared as a delicate necklace of land draped around a turquoise lagoon - some of it barely wider than an airport runway. Mojje Anungar watched the remains of his infant son, George, who died at 7 months, wash into the Pacific from a coastal graveyard. They've seen their homes flood frequently - seen the tides getting higher, seen their lives threatened. They've internalized the gravest of predictions - that the Marshall Islands, this loose collection of no-elevation coral atolls, likely will be submerged beneath the waves as humans continue to warm the atmosphere and the oceans continue to rise. People here in the Marshall Islands are living it. Out here in the middle of the Pacific, somewhere between Australia and Hawaii, there's a place where no one has the luxury of denying the existence of climate change. She grabbed the Bible and all the family members she could. "My mind and my heart were pounding," Angie told me. And Roselinta, who was sleeping with her 2-year-old son, Shiro, in a house that was being carried inland by the storm and the unusually high tide that accompanied it. Then there was Jitiam, her wild-haired nephew, who was trying to tie his family's pigs to a tree trunk to prevent them from washing away. that she actually licked her arm to be sure that, yes, this was saltwater, and, no, she wasn't having a nightmare. Another, who lives in a house where the roof is held down by evenly spaced rocks, was so bewildered by the rush of water that had invaded her house at 4 a.m. One of her cousins woke up that morning last spring to find herself floating, her plywood home filling up like an aquarium. The Marshall Islands is a collection of 29 atolls and five islands, located between Hawaii and Australia.
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