YOU PROBABLY DON’T HEAR A LOT about global warming these days. But then, you probably don’t live in the Republic of Maldives. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom does — he’s the president of the Maldives, in fact — and last week at the second United Nations Earth Summit in New York, he explained what global warming means to him and to his island nation. If the planet continues to heat up at current rates, said Gayoom in a speech delivered in the U.N.’s General Assembly hall, the Maldives will become a modern Atlantis, “totally submerged” by the run-off from melting polar ice caps. By the time the U.N. holds its next environmental conference, Gayoom warned, his country may be but a soggy memory.

Faced with such a grim prognosis, an ordinary world leader might have been tempted simply to give up, accept the inevitable, and buy a glass-bottomed boat. Not Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. There is a solution to the looming crisis of global warming, Gayoom told the assembled delegates, a way not only to stem the rising tide of the earth’s oceans and save the Maldives, but an opportunity to create in the process “a shared, a just, a prospering people’s world.” How can it be done? It won’t be easy. The Maldives will need more ” resource mobilization,” additional “technology transfer,” dramatically increased “capacity building for the promotion of sustainable development,” not to mention a strong dose of “global cooperation.” In other words, said President Gayoom, the Republic of Maldives is going to need a whole lot more foreign-aid money from the United States.