Forget Hillary ... forget Obama ... yes, even for a moment, forget Iraq ... the earth is going under! Global Warming is REAL !!!

It used to be a little spot just below India

Global warming is only this week sinking a tropical island -- and for the first time, it's an inhabited island that is disappearing beneath the rising seas. Rising oceans, caused by global warming, literally "disappeared" (to use a popular verbalization these days) an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. Lohachara island is/was in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal. The event which is (nearly) visible in the above photo taken only a couple of hours ago marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Geoffrey Lean of The Independent writes, "As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities."

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

This, my blogging friends, is the beginning of the "end" as predicted by Al Gore in his marvelous movie/book/presentation, An Inconvenient Truth.

All told, more than 70,000 persons are expected to be left homeless in this tiny spot in the middle of nowhere. But for those who once lived there ... or for those still living on some of the islands where the water is still rising, it's not "nowhere" at all.

Merry Christmas from your very real friend whose initials are SGW ... Serious Global Warming!