A Quote by Michael Specter

The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
One of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can.
It has been popular to threaten "small islands and low-lying coasts" with scenarios of disastrous future flooding. The Maldives has been the most utilised target. We have undertaken a careful analysis of actual sea level changes in the Maldives. No rise has been recorded either in the present or the past centuries.
The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into preKatrina New Orleans - below sea level and facing super-hurricanes. - Joseph Romm210. The generations living today get to retrofit, reboot, and reenergize a nation. We get to rescue and reinvent the U.S. economy.
The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre- Katrina New Orleans - below sea level and facing super-hurricanes.
If you live on an atoll and you get a warning by radio that a big wave is coming and everyone is told to move to higher ground, where are you supposed to go on these islands? There is none. The highest ground is four-meters (around 13 feet) above sea level, meaning you'd be safer in a coconut tree. How, though, are you supposed to get your grandfather, grandmother and grandchildren up there?
The highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent in science; and we have Newton. Shakspeare [sic] and Newton: in the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority, prescription and routine, the fullest room to expand as it will.
Almost all of the Marshall Islands' 72,000 residents live within seven feet of sea level. If the climate continues to change at its current pace, ocean acidification could destroy its resources and rising oceans could flood large parts of the islands.
The executive orders. Barack Obama is doing it again with this ban that he thinks is in perpetuity on offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and north of Alaska. It's bad what Obama's trying to do, and I know exactly what he is doing with this. But the first thing is, the areas that Obama has, by executive order, declared off-limits are areas nobody wants to drill in anyway. There are no plans to drill off the coast, the East Coast of the country out in the Atlantic, and there are no plans to drill north of Alaska in the Arctic Circle.
I have discovered a gem, a tiny, relatively unknown Greek island. Kastellorizo lies in the Aegean Sea a mile off the Turkish Turquoise Coast, the most easterly of the Dodecanese islands.
The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.
We will remember that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea:- Yes. We. Can.
In the vast archipelago of the east, where Borneo and Java and Sumatra lie, and the Molucca Islands, and the Philippines, the sea is often fanned only by the land and sea breezes, and is like a smooth bed, on which these islands seem to sleep in bliss,--islands in which the spice and perfume gardens of the world are embowered, and where the bird of paradise has its home, and the golden pheasant, and a hundred others of brilliant plumage, whose flight is among thickets so luxuriant, and scenery so picturesque, that European strangers find there the fairy land of their youthful dreams.
Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos can shift the whole system to a higher order.
As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.
6,400 feet, that's the highest up I've ever been above the ground and so to get to a point beyond that, that'll be a little special moment.
There's one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America. You have to travel to the country's northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska's North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.
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