Guest essay by Eric Worrall

WUWT has reported several times about the ongoing story of the failed Kiribati Climate Refugee. Now the BBC has done a followup story, about Mr. Teitiota’s allegedly sad circumstances, now that he is back in Kiribati. But not everything is as it seems.

Mr Teitiota, his wife and three children are staying at his brother-in-law’s house. It’s a basic cinder block box with no chairs and virtually no modern conveniences. He has two penned pigs in his yard and a pack of stray dogs scratch themselves under the palm trees. He warns me about the brown dog. That’s the dangerous one. And he doesn’t like it being so close to his kids. The family relies on rainwater for drinking. The tank is too small, so they struggle to get enough. It’s a bitter irony in a place that’s constantly threatened with inundation. They pump water from the ground too, but it’s filthy. The groundwater here is just below the surface, which makes it vulnerable to contamination from humans and animals above.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34674374

OK, so far so good. But then the BBC makes the following startling statement;

Mr Kidd sees politics in the mix. There are potentially hundreds of millions of people in low-lying areas that could be affected by sea level rises. He wonders if wealthy countries fear that cases like Mr Teitiota’s could turn climate migration from a trickle to a raging torrent. But there hasn’t been a dramatic exodus just yet. The New Zealand immigration department sets aside 75 places a year in a lottery for migrants from Kiribati, and at the moment it can’t fill them. President Anote Tong suggests that is because things aren’t desperate enough yet.

Whats up with that? If the alleged climate hardships of life in Kiribati are such a non issue, that Kiribati people can’t even be bothered to apply for lottery places to migrate to New Zealand, what possibly justification could there have ever been for the ridiculous waste of time and resources, represented by Mr. Teitiota’s application for climate refugee status? How can there be any doubt that the New Zealand High Court made the right decision, to reject Mr. Teitiota’s bogus climate refugee claim?

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