‘We cannot wait for speeches when the sea is rising around us all the time,” said Simon Kofe, the one-time foreign minister of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, in a 2021 address. Kofe’s warning was the kind of boilerplate climate-change catastrophism to which all save the most dedicated activists long ago became inured. It wouldn’t have made any waves if Kofe hadn’t delivered his missive standing in hip-deep water, flanked by United Nations and Tuvaluan flags, and wearing a smartly tailored suit. The theatrics made the point Kofe’s formulaic rhetoric could not.
Indeed, the prospect that many of the world’s low-lying island nations and coastal enclaves will soon be subsumed due to rising sea levels has been a feature of climate-change alarmism for decades. “I think one day we will disappear,” one Tuvaluan mourned in a 2019 interview with the Guardian. “You’re making this island disappear,” read the accusatory CNN headline that graced a breathless 2015 article castigating its audience for failing to save the Marshall Islands from inundation. The oceans will “completely cover” the Maldives “within the next 30 years,” a 1988 piece in the Canberra Times warned. “But the end of the Maldives and its 200,000 people could come sooner if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992, as predicted.”
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