Population growth is THE problem.

Never mind the thousands of animals and plants that also live on those atolls, they have nowhere else to go. People will simply relocate. The human animal only thinks of itself.

Exelent detailed post. It would appear that 'climate change' is being used to deflect from a host of underlying social, political and cultural problems.

Credit where due: a sound and detailed article which reaches irrefutable conclusions.

Policy relevant facts on climate change:

1. Climate change does not change in smooth curves as the climate modelers' would have you believe. It changes abruptly. Always has and always will.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1 ,
http://web.vims.edu/sms/Courses/ms501_2000/Broecker1995.pdf

2. Life thrives when the planet is warmer and struggles when colder. It thrives during warming periods and struggles during cooling. See Figure 15.21 here: http://eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf . Note that the climate warmed from near glacial temperatures to near current temperatures in 7 years 14,600 years ago and in 9 years, 11,600 years ago. And guess what? Life loved the rapid warming periods. Life burst out and thrived.

3. For 75% of the last half billion years - the period when animal life has thrived - there has been no ice caps at either pole http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-3.html . We are currently in a cold-house phase. It strains credulity to argue that 1% warming (i.e. 3K/273K) will be catastrophic when we won’t get anywhere near the global average temperatures of the previous warm times.

4. The planet has been cooling for the past 50 million years and we are currently in only the third cold-house phase in the past half billion years.

5. We won’t get out of the current cold-house phase until plate tectonics movements reopen a path for global ocean circulation around the equatorial regions http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html .

6. Warming and increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been a major benefit to life and to humanity for the past 200 years. It strains credulity to accept the increased plant productivity that this positive trend is delivering will suddenly change and turn negative.

7. Despite 25 years of climate research and spending reportedly $1.5 trillion per year on the ‘Climate Industry’ http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/07/30/377086.htm , we have only a very poor understanding of the damage function. In fact, most people who blabber on about 'climate science' and call those who do not accept their interpretations of the relevant facts "climate deniers" haven’t even heard of the damage function, let alone able to define it and quantify it.

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8. According to the most widely accept Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) for projecting future climate damages, abatement costs, social cost of carbon, net-cost benefit of proposed policies, the abatement policies that have a net cost - irrespective of any climate considerations - would be a net cost, not a net benefit for all this century. See the chart here:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2014/10/Lang-3.jpg
explanation here: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2014/10/27/cross-post-peter-lang-why-the-world-will-not-agree-to-pricing-carbon-ii/

9. Figure 3 in http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0613-3 (free access to earlier version here: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf ) shows that global warming projected by the climate modelers would be net beneficial for most of this century. The only component that becomes a significant net cost, late in the century, is energy. This cost is based on the assumption that energy costs must rise as GHG mitigation policies force us to move to renewables. However, we won’t move to renewables (because they cannot provide the energy the world needs). We'll move to cheap nuclear power. With cheap energy and all other parameters summing to be a significantly net-beneficial any GW that does occur would be net beneficial to well beyond this century. (Professor Richard Tol - has been a recognised world leader in estimating the damage effects of climate change for 25 years or so.)

10. What is needed to support rational policy analysis are probability distributions for:

a. time to next abrupt climate change

b. direction of next abrupt climate change (i.e. warming or cooling)

c. duration of next abrupt climate change

d. total amount of change

e. damage function (i.e. net economic cost per degree of warning or cooling)

It is concerning that we’ve spent 25 years on climate research (and are spending some $1.5 trillion per year on policies justified on the basis of CAGW) to get to the point we are at now where we know little that is relevant for rational policy analysis.