No Distant Future: Climate change as an existential threat

Abstract

The office of Nei Tabera Ni Kai (NTK), a film unit based in the town of Bairiki, in the small island nation of Kiribati, is a small concrete building situated two metres above sea level, thirty metres from the lagoon on one side and forty-five metres from the ocean on the other. Stacked under the louvered glass windows of one of its small rooms are 200 internal hard drives taken from computers over a period of twenty years. The office has no air conditioning, and the air is salty; there are regular electricity blackouts; and higher than normal wave surges, or "king tides", threaten the town - and the whole southern end of the atoll, South Tarawa, on which it is located - more frequently than they used to. Show more