Though the study’s lead author is Naomi Biribo, a senior civil servant in Tarawa, Tong has ignored it and become a minor international celebrity by blaming the island’s coastal problems uniformly on climate change. “We are on the front lines of climate change,” he has often said, and Conservation International—Tong is a member of the group’s board—describes him as “a loving grandfather who is concerned that his country will no longer exist when his grandchildren grow up.”

Tong’s stirring descriptions of his people’s plight have led to the creation in Australia of a committee to promote his candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Its organizer, Philip Glendinning of the Edmund Rice Centre, did not answer several e-mail requests for comment.) Scientists like Kench say that the people of Tarawa will face the same choices as other coastal denizens when the sea rises further. Either they allow the beach to move forward and they retreat inland to higher ground, or they build concrete seawalls and the beach is washed away—a particularly unpleasant choice for places like Waikiki, the touristy neighborhood of Honolulu that is dominated by high-rises.

“Clearly, the highly urbanized atolls like Tarawa where so many people live on the narrow parts are going to require expensive engineering solutions if they can’t reduce their populations,” Kench said. Or they can move back to their home islands. Aranuka, for example, has seen its population drop to 800 as many moved to Tarawa. It has the same land area as Tarawa, but instead of being long and thin, part of it is three miles by five on the lee side of the island—“Good protection against the waves,” said Kench. “I’d say it has a good chance of surviving climate change.”

One of Tong’s signature projects has been the purchase of land in Fiji so his people will have somewhere to go to when, as he put it to Zakaria on CNN, all his country’s islands “are underwater, given the projections being put forward by the IPCC.” The search had been going on since 2011, when Tong announced his intention to buy land as insurance against climate change during his third and last campaign. In 2012, after settling on an estate in Fiji, he told the Associated Press, “We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it ... It’s basically going to be a matter of survival.” After people protested in Tarawa that they did not want to leave, Tong said that the real purpose of the acquisition was to insure food security, though Kiribati people eat mostly imported rice and local fish.

On May 23, Tong announced on Kiribati Radio the completion of the purchase for $8.7 million taken from Kiribati’s $600 million sovereign wealth fund, whose interest goes into the budget.

That night at the Lagoon Club in Tarawa, a bare-bones beachside bar that’s a favorite watering hole for senior officials, former environment minister Amberoti Nikora, who was instrumental in the purchase, was celebrating, beer in hand. “The place can hold 60,000, 70,000 people,” he told me confidently. “People should not be afraid of the future, the government will take care of them.”