It appears the AP article was published on June 29th, 1989. [0]

As an aside, I'm not sure why they call it an AP "dispatch" in this case. Does anyone know the definition of the term dispatch in this context?

[0] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/notable-quotable-the-art-of...

Back then AP didn't publish things on their own. They just sent it out ("dispatched it") to subscribing newspapers.

That makes sense. Thank you!

Yeah the lack of a timestamp is definitely confusing. The page source lists a definitely incorrect timestamp, I guess the time the article was digitized.

    "@type":"NewsArticle","author":[],"dateModified":"","datePublished":"2021-04-20T13:32:25Z",

Searching google for the first paragraph brings up related articles that point out it was said in 1989.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...

Most coral atolls have actually been growing. It's been over 30 years since the statement and not one has succumbed.

I don't even see a headline....weird.

The year 2000 has already past.

Yes. So the argument is that this will probably happen then.

Because we didn't get it better under control by 2000.

The argument is that these island nations might actually already be lost.

Scientists estimate an around 40 year "climate lag" between cause and effect so if you think this is bad, we're only living out the happy times from the seventies with Pink Floyd and ABBA. And then, once you have it there, CO2 has an atmospheric "half life" counted in centuries. It's why climate change is so damn nasty. :-(

It also really doesn't jive well with our short election periods where after a few years, some new guy with a radically different policy will get in charge if the earlier one wasn't popular because <insert too radical climate policy here>.

If you read the headline carefully, it's the global warming that needs to be reversed before 2000; the disappearance of nations can (and will) happen after.

The reason this is true is that CO2 emissions can't really be reversed; accounting for all forms of "capture" (biomass, sea exchange, calcification) CO2 disappears in a reverse power law way, such that after 10 000 years 10% of it is still there (https://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg)

The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.

Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct".

The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.

You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."

So we're well and truly doomed then, and there's really no point?

There can still be worse outcomes from higher levels of warming. It's not just on or off.

Nonsense. Now we prepare for this to happen - by preemptively allocating places for displaced people can go. We do our best to limit how many countries are affected.

There's never a point where all we can do is throw up our hands and do nothing. There's always something to be done, even if it's not directly related to the cause of the crisis.

It said "some nations", mostly small island ones, like Tuvalu and Fiji.

That's not worldwide doom. It's just a very clear indicator of the damage that happens elsewhere, where low-lying cities like Amsterdam, New York, and much of Bangladesh have to either go elsewhere or take very expensive damage control measures.

We're at a point where it's still cheaper to prevent that at the climate level. It just grows more expensive by the day. Things can cost a lot of lives and dollars without being apocalyptic, and still worth dealing with sooner rather than later.

While some ill effects can most likely no longer be prevented, even worse things happen at higher temperatures. Every tenth of a degree makes things worse.

Yes, some places are doomed. It's not a black and white outcome like all the denier downvoters cling to.

I like to think of it like this - some places are doomed to extreme drought and flodding and others will be mostly spared - but the environmental effects are just one piece of the puzzle, other areas of the earth will need to cope with the refugee crisis we're going to see from parts of the world becoming less habitable.

As these crises put more stress on the rest of the world we're just going to accelerate exploitation to support more people with less stuff - we're essentially burning through the world's buffer of habitability to eek out a bit more profits today.

It didn't say in the year 2000 islands would be covered, but that if the trend weren't reversed by then that they would be.