Talk about being creative. Cabinet ministers in the Maldives held an underwater meeting Saturday to draw attention to the threat global warming poses to the lowest-lying nation on earth. President Mohammed Nasheed and members of his cabinet, dressed in scuba gear, met in a lagoon off the island of Girifushi. They sat at a table anchored to the sand on the floor of the Indian Ocean and signed a document calling on all countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.
Officials from around the world will meet in the Copenhagen, the Danish capital, under UN auspices to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, with the aim of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that are blamed for global warming.
The ministers said that if something isn't done to stem the rate of rising sea levels, the entire archipelago could end up under the water by the end of the century, since the island group is only a couple meters above sea level. Scientists at a meeting in Copenhagen last March predicted that glaciers and ice sheets melting as a result of global warming could boost the level of the world's oceans by as much as a meter by 2100.
