FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu — The rising sea is eating at the shores of low-slung Funafuti, a spit of coral and coconut palms in the remote Pacific. Unseen fingers of ocean even reach beneath the sands, surfacing inland in startling places among nervous islanders.
"It used to be puddles. Now it's like lakes," said Hilia Vavae, local meteorologist.
Far to the north in the Marshall Islands, 1,250 miles away, trees are toppling before aquamarine waves. Watching, perplexed, from the edge of a lagoon, teenager Ankit Stephen asked a visitor: "Why is this happening?"
Six hundred miles west on tiny Kosrae, Alokoa Talley pondered the same question. Neighbors are moving their homes up the lush slopes, away from the encroaching Pacific. "I don't know," a government worker said, "but I think it's because of 'green' something."
The "greenhouse effect," climate change, has languished on the world's agenda since the 1970s, a seemingly distant threat. But year by year, inch by inch, it is rising to the top as ocean islets flood, glaciers retreat, Arctic permafrost melts and voices raise new alarms.
"We may already be seeing -- in the increased incidence of drought, floods and extreme weather events that many regions are experiencing -- some of the devastation that lies ahead," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in March, when he urged all governments to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions.
That long-stalled 1997 accord is opposed in Washington, where U.S. government and industry say emission controls would handicap the U.S. economy. Now only ratification by Russia can revive it, making this a critical year on the political front in a long, difficult debate over what to do about climate change.
On the scientific front, meanwhile, signs of global warming mount. Like the glass of a greenhouse, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases in the atmosphere let sunlight in but tend to warm the Earth by trapping heat it emits toward space. That's scientific fact; the scientific puzzle involves other factors that might lessen -- or worsen -- the warming and what it does to the planet.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fossil fuels burned in everything from automobiles to electricity plants, reached record levels in the atmosphere last winter, a Hawaii observatory reported in March.
