In 1989, the Canberra Times and Guardian reported that only global communism can prevent one to four metres of sea level rise by the year 2030.
GOVERNMENTS must yield national sovereignty to multilateral authorities able to enforce laws “across environmentally invisible frontiers” if the greenhouse effect, which threatens the future of whole nations, is to be overcome, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sir Shridath, said on Tuesday.
A Commonwealth Expert Group set up to look at climate change estimated there was a 90 per cent certainty …. that sea levels would rise by between one and four metres by the year 2030.
Global warming and sea level rises would continue for decades, perhaps centuries. There was a prospect of wide- spread, perhaps catastrophic flooding across large areas of Egypt, India, China, the United States, Britain and Holland, and atolls in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
Who would house the displaced populations of low lying areas like the Maldives, a chain of 1200 islands barely above sea level?
Environmentalists determined that slow economic growth was needed to combat poverty.
“The need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, the main green- house gas, has prompted many environmentalists to advocate a world of slower economic growth. So long as large-scale poverty and rapid population growth remained, this was no solution.”
- Canberra Times via The Guardian, January 26, 1989
26 Jan 1989 – Call for anti-greenhouse action – Trove
Had we listened to the experts thirty years ago, we could have prevented this tragic scene unfolding today in the Maldives.
