For the first time in recorded history, the ocean has wholly consumed an inhabited island.

The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

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.

I remember living in our beach house in Hawaii, watching as our shoreline disappeared a little more with each storm. (Some of you will remember that it even made the news there.) By the time we’d left, we’d lost the majority of palm trees that had onced lined our shoreline.

Now, I’m in frequent touch with the couple who bought our old house. Turns out, the erosion only got worse and they had to install sandbags — at great expense — to protect the shore. Of course, the island’s bureaucracy first required them to jump through numerous hoops to get permission, and even now that the sandbags are there, the red tape is nowhere near its end.

Is all this due to global warming, or is it just the eventual alteration of land by the incessant demands of the sea? I, for one, haven’t the slightest idea. But I’m going to do my patriotic part to combat it: I’m going to eat beef.

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