Single King Tide Ruins Year's Crops On Ifalik, Micronesia - Sea Level Up 4" 1993 -2008 Per NASA

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Kneeling in the mud beside an Ifalik taro patch on an overcast day last November, Thomas Hachiglit, a canoe carver, explains why such a scenario isn't so far-fetched. The starchy yellow blub that grows beneath the plant is the island's staple food. Healthy plants produce firm taros as long as a man's arm. But a year after a so-called king tide inundated the patch with salt water, Ifalik's taros are still the size of a fist and often mushy and foul-smelling. The island's other main crops, banana and breadfruit, are less abundant or seasonal and outside supplies are far off. Only several ships a year visit Ifalik and the journey takes weeks. Hachiglit worries that a typhoon or another king tide will lead to food shortages. "We could flee, but the other neighboring islands are also affected," said Hachiglit. "The only option I see is bigger countries, like Australia or the United States, but that will take years and in that time people will starve."

Chief Pekaicheng isn't at Copenhagen, but he has proposed two solutions to his island's climate crisis: send a ship his people can live on or send money to purchase land elsewhere. Neither seems promising. "We just put our lives in the hands of God," he said, "and hope the people who cause all these problems step in and help."

FSM and other small island nations argue that global leaders need to limit temperature rises to well below 1.5°C and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions below 350 parts per million. But to the frustration of M.J. Mace, a legal adviser on climate policy for FSM, many larger countries are still focused on a 2°C rise limit. "You can't come together as a U.N.-created body and agree to wipe members off the map," Mace says. "That's what agreeing on a two degree rise would do."

Sea levels in the tropical western Pacific rose about 4 inches (10 cm) between 1993 and 2008, according to 2008 NASA satellite data, faster than most other locations on the planet, and far outpacing the global average of 1.7 inches (4.5 cm). A report released on Nov. 24 by a group of leading climate researchers states that seas could rise as much as 3.5 to 6.5 feet (1 to 2 meters) by the end of the century. FSM won't necessarily be off the map, but the map will have changed dramatically. Dr. Rolph Payet, who was the co-lead author of the "Small Islands" section of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has taken a keen interest in countries like FSM, which were never really on the map to begin with. "Herein lays the dilemma," said Payet, who hails from the Seychelles, an island nation off the east coast of Africa. "Adaptation and survival that has developed over thousands of years now has to change overnight."

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http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070_1947456,00.html