Steve, I’m using this article as an example of what’s happening to these islands, not as something that needs to be published in a scientific journal, look at it in context. This isn’t a result of a growing population; it’s hovered around 100,000 for the last several decades without significant growth. It’s not the result of poor agricultural choices; aside from wild coconut and the occasional taro pit there are no crops grown in this country. This is a population that lives totally from hand to mouth, roughly 70-80 percent of food consumed comes from what can be locally caught in the ocean (and if other, larger nations with better equipped fishing vessels decide to poach a larger percentage of fish than usual, then the local population suffers greatly. I have a friend who served in a village that went through this). I do respect your concern for journalistic integrity (it’s extremely important to distinguish reality from junk science, especially in these weird times), but that isn’t the purpose of this article. I’ve talked to a number of locals about this and they all agreed, they are living pretty much the same way they have for a very long time, and suddenly within the last few years the water levels are getting higher and higher and submerging what little land they have.