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Marshall Islands Vice President challenges Australia to lead the region on climate change and help save his nation.
In March 1946, the United States dropped the first of 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands, a tiny nation of scattered atolls in the northern Pacific Ocean.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands US Embassy website documents the testing program that ended in August 1958 - how some Marshallese were evacuated from their homes to allow the bombs to drop and how radioactive dust fell on half the nation. The slow but inevitable emergence of tumours, the sharp spikes in cancers, the displacement of communities - all documented in a shocking timeline.
The largest of the bombs – the Bravo shot detonated in 1957 – was 1000 times more powerful than the "Little Boy" dropped by the United States on Hiroshima 12 years earlier. The U.S Navy gave the various testing rounds names. There was Operation Ivy, Castle, Redwing and Hardtack.
Ironically, in 1951, there was also "Operation Greenhouse".
The Marshall Islands Vice President is Senator Tony de Brum. He was born the year before the testing started and grew up on the Marshall atoll of Likiep. He is visiting Australia this week to talk to politicians, government officials and pretty much anyone else, about another experiment which he says his people are now suffering from. That is, human-caused climate change. Another Operation Greenhouse.
The Marshallese people fear they will be among the world's first climate change refugees, with rising sea levels threatening their nation's existence. Senator de Brum told me he sees the similarities between those post World War Two nuclear tests and the islands precarious existence now.
The parallels are of course there. We had to cope with the mass displacement of communities and populations from one atoll to another. The testing program did leave many of our citizens as exiles in their own country – unable to return to their homelands which had been their homes for in some cases as long as 12,000 years.
The underlying link is that climate change is happening to us, but it is not of our doing. We are vulnerable to climate change but we are not major emitters and polluters of the world. In the case of the testing program, our consent was not sought but we are still feeling the effects.
The Marshall Islands - population 68,000 - consists of 22 communities living on 70 square miles (180 square kilometres) of land on 34 atolls spread across 750,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometres) of ocean. The average height of the islands above sea level is just two metres.
On Monday, Senator de Brum delivered a public lecture at the Australian National University in Canberra, with the arresting title "Climate change is destroying my country".
In September the Marshall Island capital of Majuro will host the Pacific Islands Forum where the theme will be "Marshalling the Pacific Response to the Climate Challenge".
Senator de Brum told me that after former US Secretary of State Hilary had attended last year's forum, there was hope that current Secretary John Kerry would do the same. "We very much expect that Secretary Kerry will join us in Majuro. Other wise it would be like the US reversing its pivot to the Pacific."
At the forum, the hosts will propose a "Majuro Declaration for Climate Leadership", which is still being drafted, to "galvanize more urgent and concrete action on climate change from governments, business, and other stakeholders".
Senator de Brum says his country is feeling the effects of climate change chiefly from rising sea levels causing flooding and inundation of crops. There is also a state of emergency currently in force in northern and central atolls, where drought is threatening food supplies and drinking water is running out.
A 2011 report (pdf link here) prepared into climate change in the Marshall Islands by Australia's science agency CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology found that since 1993, satellite measurements showed sea levels were rising at a rate of about 7mm a year, well above the global average. There was "high confidence" that the sea levels would continue to rise.
Given how slowly the climate will respond to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, I asked Senator de Brum if it was already too late for the Marshall Islands and its people.
That does cross your mind. It would be unnatural for that not to. But if I did not believe that there was a possibility and potential to turn this back at some scale then I would not be here doing what I am doing.
We have to hold out for some confidence and optimism that we can in fact turn this thing around. If we don't then it's not just the demise of the Marshalls that's up ahead but it's the demise of the world as we know it and the planet as we know it.
We are merely the canary in the mine, as it were.
While the current drought and flooding was a pressing issue, Senator de Brum said it was the longer term issues of sea level rise which were the most concerning.
If the pollution continues in the same way then we will not limit ourselves to two degrees of global warming by the end of the century. That concerns us because that does predict some rather dire actions that must be undertaken to cope with displacement.
It's an enormous undertaking and it does spook politicians and planners and the private sector just thinking about the enormity of the problem and what we must do about it.
It is for us a question of survival, as it is with Kiribati and Tuvalu and other similarly situated states. We see a moral responsibility as well for those who feel that it is more important to concentrate on current economic issues and how climate change plays out in that arena rather than in how to make sure that people survive this onslaught.
I asked how a Marshall Islands Senator viewed plans to boost Australia's exports of coal and gas.
We understand the concerns of developed and developing countries to make sure their economies are robust and on a good track. But we also see that it's necessary that Australia and New Zealand – Australia especially – as the biggest Pacific country that we are involved with, should take leadership in this and consider what happens if people blindly pursue economic development at the expense of creating more drastic climate change.
Senator de Brum says climate change is very much a live issue among the people on the islands.
Within my lifetime I have seen islands disappear off the face of the Earth. We have shorelines being eroded where World War Two ammo once declared safe and of no concern to human safety are now being exposed and need to be dealt with again.
We are running out of drinking water. The bananas and limes and grapefruits are dying because the water underneath them is salty. It's real and the people cannot help but talk about it. As they line up for their drinking water, I'm sure that's all they are talking about.