Majuro — My wife and I recently took some of our grandchildren to Laura Beach at the end of the island in Majuro. We have been going there for decades. The beach, located at the atoll’s tip, is long. It has white sand, a nice picnic area and other facilities. The water has a perfect temperature, and is usually calm and shallow (unless the tide is very high) so even the little ones can swim safely there. These are some of Laura Beach’s best qualities.
As we pulled up to our favorite parking spot near the lone outdoor shower, a man from the car parked beside us offered up an unsolicited observation. “The water is so hot today.” Initially, I thought, well, the sea is always a bit warm when the tide is out and the sky has no cloud cover to reduce the sun’s heat. Apparently sensing my indifference, the man added, “I mean, the water is really hot.”
I took my 2-year-old grandson, Zeke, down to the water’s edge and waded in. It felt like the seawater had been boiled. It felt as if you had run water for a bath and made it just a little too hot. We waded in a bit deeper and the temperature didn’t change much at all. It was unsettling. I scouted around for someone to commiserate with. There was a woman swimming near me. “I can’t believe how hot this water is,” I remarked. She replied, “It’s scary. I’m surprised this beach isn’t covered with dead fish.”
It is scary. Those of us living on the islands started feeling the effects of climate change ahead of the rest of the world.
In 2011, the single outer island of Kili was inundated during a king-tide event. The ocean quickly rose and covered the island in saltwater causing the coral runway to take on the appearance of a river. The islanders panicked. They had lived on Kili for decades and had never seen anything like this.
The island has served as the home-in-exile for Bikinians who had been relocated by the U.S. government to make way for nuclear testing that occurred from 1946 to 1958. I lived and worked in Kili for three years in the 1980s.
The seawater, once it finally receded, had killed much of the vegetation and food crops. Our early take on what we had witnessed was that it was just an unusual natural event. However, after 2011, the inundations on Kili started coming back in varying degrees each year.
It was worse in 2015. Someone on Kili took a video on his phone just after the sea rose and swamped the island and sent it to me. It was a short film of a little boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, wading thigh-deep through water that had flooded the dirt road, while carrying a 10-lb. bag of rice on his shoulder to his house. That sight of the vanished, water-filled road was troubling enough, but what struck me even harder was the boy’s attitude. He pushed through the choppy water as if it were just a “normal” day.
Now, in 2024, it is not just the island region that is experiencing troubling changes in the environment. This past month, the NOAA National Weather Service data confirmed what billions around the world literally felt: Temperatures in July made it the hottest month on record. It was the 14th consecutive month that a global heat record was set in NOAA's data.
Before, the pace of climate change felt as if it was just getting worse gradually. Now, changes in the planet’s weather patterns seem to be accelerating so much that the normally warm seawater turns unusually hot. You often overhear island people these days exclaiming to each other, “Worror, it is so hot out today.” Yes, we live in the tropics where it is warm most of the time, but not this warm.
The earth is now experiencing more radical weather-driven events, such as forest fires, extremely powerful hurricanes, typhoons and tornados that touch down in places where they have never been seen before. The first tornadoes ever recorded in Wisconsin in February occurred just after temperatures reached record status. The worst five forest fires in U.S. history have all occurred in the last six years.
There are public health issues, which are often ignored because most of the climate change advocates are focused on sea-level rise and the unusual weather events around the globe.
The Marshall Islands just experienced a state of health emergency for thirty-eight consecutive months, which we never had before. A serious dengue fever outbreak in the summer of 2019 rolled right into the Covid -19 pandemic that lasted until September 2022.
The solutions at times feel so out of reach because overcoming the related issues would require cooperation among billions of people and their governments. Our children and grandchildren are inheriting a complicated existence: an overcrowded planet with a fast-changing environment that creates complex communal and political issues.
How do we address this rapidly devolving situation to protect their futures and give them hope?
Human nature doesn’t seem to respond efficiently and effectively to climate-related issues unless their own backyards are burning. Now that there are more burning backyards on the planet, we hope for some practical, science-driven solutions to emerge.
In the meantime, Pacific island governments must focus on overall disaster preparations, covering not just natural events such as inundations from the rising seas, but also human safety.
We need to beef up our fragile healthcare systems to prepare for unprecedented and unpredictable events. The days of a lackadaisical approach to managing medical supply, lab and drug inventories are over. Our inventory and supply systems need to be overhauled into high-level efficiency, reliability and readiness to deliver a punctual response to an emergency. Our healthcare professionals need the respect and the financial support of their respective governments to upgrade these response systems in our hospitals.
Lastly, if our Pacific regional governments are indeed going to get serious about the consequences of climate change, then it is time to “walk the walk.” Those of us in the Pacific who are crying out about what we are seeing, such as “hot” seawater, need to change how we go about addressing the overall climate change issue. Governments around the world should consider attending annual climate change conferences via video calls instead of spending huge sums of money to fly to the often-exotic locations in person, These scarce operational funds could be used for much-needed domestic disaster preparation systems.
Jack Niedenthal is the former secretary of Health Services for the Marshall Islands, where he has lived and worked for 43 years. He is the author of “For the Good of Mankind, An Oral History of the People of Bikini,” and president of Microwave Films, which has produced six award-winning feature films in the Marshallese language. Send feedback to jackniedenthal@gmail.com
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