
You Need to Visit These 10 Places Before They're Swallowed by Global Warming
It's 2009 in Battambang and I'm gripping a piece of knotted rope.
The rains this year have been particularly heavy, leading to floods across most of northern Cambodia. This town is no exception, turning a steep and muddy street into a waterfall as deep as my waist. Residents have tied a length of rope going down the hill to help people keep their feet, for which I'm particularly grateful as I slip for the third time.
The weather report says we can expect more rain later today and again tomorrow. Even for the Mekong rainy season, this has been an extraordinary month.
That was eight years ago.
The awful truth is that it is too late to stop global warming completely. For the past few decades, a dedicated campaign of disinformation has paralyzed America into inaction, convincing many people that this observable phenomenon is a hoax (often by trying to erase the distinction between "climate" and "weather"). Carbon dioxide wasn't listening, though, and, as was recently reported by the National Climate Assessment, the planet has already warmed by over one degree in the past 50 years, with disastrous consequences.
It's hard to say exactly how far this will go, but at the current rate of warming quite a few of the world's treasures are quickly evaporating. With help from Gary Arndt, a photographer and author of the website Everything Everywhere, here are ten places that you should see while there's still time. (All photographs courtesy of Gary Arndt.)
!["I was just in Tuvalu last October," Arndt said, "and that is widely considered to be the country that is most susceptible to [global warming] right now. They're basically looking for places where they can move the whole country." "There's been talk of moving it to parts of Fiji or New Zealand, even or parts of Australia," he added. "It would be the first time in history when an entire country has had to move en masse."The low-lying islands of the South Pacific are literally being washed away.Paradise has never been far above sea level to begin with. Countries like Tuvalu, the Maldives and Kiribati sit on coral atolls, low islands that form around lagoons and coral reefs. Beautiful, with their long sand beaches and aquamarine waters, they have always been relatively fragile ecosystems.Today, rising sea levels have begun to drag these islands back under the sea, while increasingly bad storms wash out fresh water supplies and coat arable land with salt water. The South Pacific is losing its islands, and what land remains is becoming increasingly uninhabitable.](https://www.thestreet.com/.image/c_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cg_face%2Ch_80%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_80/MTY4NjUwNTU2MjQzMTI1ODk1/10-the-south-pacific.png)
![The Great Barrier Reef is dying. One of the most misunderstood aspects of global warming is the severe damage that small changes can do. An increase of one degree might not sound like much, but it represents significant, chaotic changes across many ecosystems. Water levels may rise in one country while receding in another. Some places will get hotter while others, seemingly paradoxically, get colder because of disrupted weather patterns.Meanwhile all that carbon dioxide in the air is steadily finding its way into the ocean, making it increasingly acidic. Coral, already delicate as it is, can't handle those changes."The ocean acidification is really bad for coral specifically," Arndt said. "When you consider that it [coral] is calcium carbonate, it's one of the reasons along with the temperature of the water that causes things like the Great Barrier Reef, large sections of it, to die off."Biologists call the process "coral bleaching," when coral turns white as it dies and becomes essentially a chunk of rock.](https://www.thestreet.com/.image/c_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cg_face%2Ch_80%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_80/MTY4NjUwNTU1OTc0ODIxNTEx/9-the-great-barrier-reef.png)







