The first refugees of global warming
Bangladesh watches in horror as much of the
nation gives way to sea
The Chicago Tribune, May 2, 2007
ANTARPARA, Bangladesh -- Muhammad Ali, a wiry
65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air
conditioner or done much of anything that
produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming
planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate
refugee.
In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear
down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five
times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge
Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that
scientists believe are caused by global warming and
greater glacier melt in the Himalayas.
Now the last of his land is gone, and Ali squats on a
precarious piece of government-owned riverbank -the only ground available -- knowing the river
probably will take that as well once the monsoons
start this month.
"Where we are standing, in five days it will be
gone," he predicts. "Our future thinking is that if
this problem is not taken care of, we will be swept
away."
Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed
into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of
the most vulnerable places to climate change. As
the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little
more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid
some of Asia's mightiest rivers -- the Ganges,
Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna -- is seeing
saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking
water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once
grew rice now are raising shrimp.
Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is
likely to face increasingly violent storms as the
weather warms and see surging seas carry
saltwater farther and farther up the country's
rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.
On Bangladesh's southern coast, erosion driven in
part by accelerating glacier melt and unusually
intense rains already has scoured away half of
Bhola Island, which once covered an area nearly 20
times the size of Chicago. Land disputes, many
driven by erosion, now account for 77 percent of
Bangladesh's legal suits. In the dry northwest of the
country, droughts are getting more severe. And if
sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century,
as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will
disappear.
"Bangladesh is nature's laboratory on disaster
management," said Ainun Nishat, Bangladesh
representative of the World Conservation Union
and a government adviser on climate change. As
temperatures rise and more severe weather takes
hold worldwide, "this is one of the countries that is
going to face the music most," he said.
Bangladesh is hardly the only low-lying nation
facing tough times as the world warms. But
scientists say it in many ways represents climate
change's "perfect storm" of challenges because it is
extremely poor, extremely populated and
extremely susceptible.
"One island here has more people than all of the
small island states put together," said Atiq Rahman,
executive director of the Bangladesh Center for
Advanced Studies and a top national climate change
expert.
With so many huge rivers discharging into the
ocean, the country couldn't build dikes to hold back
the sea even if it had the money, Rahman said. And
though it has created virtually none of the pollution
driving global warming, it is unlikely to receive the
international assistance it needs to adapt to
conditions created by others.
What that might mean for big polluting nations
such as the United States, China and India is that
"for every hundred thousand tons of carbon you
emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family,"
Rahman said, only half joking. India already is
building a fence along its border with Bangladesh.
The extent of Bangladesh's coming problem is
evident in Antarpara, a village stuck between the
Jamuna and Bangali rivers five hours northwest of
Dhaka, the capital. In it and other low-lying villages
nearby, more than half of the 3,300 families have
lost their land to worsening river erosion. Some
have moved their homes a dozen times and are
running out of places to flee.
Antarpara's village head, who once owned 700
acres, is now penniless. The village's school has had
to close for two to three months each time the
community flees the intruding Jamuna. In the past
year, the river has marched 300 feet toward the
village's latest temporary homes on government
land, and now the closest shack is just 30 feet from
the roiling waters. Visitors are warned not to
venture near the edge.
"Please protect this land, so we can stay here," begs
Monwara Begum, 35, a mother of three. "We are
wondering how we will live, how we will manage
this river."
"Slowly, it has destroyed village after village," said
Ali, the farmer, whose son operates a bicycle
rickshaw in Dhaka.
Bangladesh's capital today is home to a growing sea
of landless rural migrants like Jaha Nura Begum, 35,
who lives in a rickety bamboo hut perched on stilts
over a fetid backwater of the Turag River. Her
family and 20 others fled Bhola Island three years
ago when "the river took all our land, and there was
nothing," she said. Now her husband breaks bricks
as a day laborer at a nearby kiln and "we only eat if
we can find work."
With climate migrants accounting for at least a
third and perhaps as many as two-thirds of rural
dwellers flooding to Dhaka, even that work is hard
to get. "As more and more come, it is more chaotic
here," Begum said.
Bangladesh's government is doing what it can to
prepare for coming hard times. With the help of
non-profit organizations, it is testing new saltresistant crops, building thousands of raised
shelters to protect those in the path of cyclones and
trying to elevate roads and bridges above rising
rivers. Leaders who once insisted that the West
created the problem and should clean it up "now
accept we should prepare," Nishat said.
The alternative could be ugly: insufficient food, a
destabilized government, internal strife that could
spread past the country's borders, a massive
exodus of climate refugees and more extremism,
Rahman said.
"A person victimized and displaced will not sit idle,"
he predicted. "There will be organized climatedisplaced groups saying, 'Why should you hang
onto your place when I've lost mine and you're the
one who did this?'
"That," he said, "is not a pleasant scenario."
San Jose Mercury News -- April, 2006
San Jose Mercury News
Perspective Section April 9, 2006
Why we need to worry about global warming, now
With climate-related changes occurring faster
than expected,scientists say we have 10 years to
slash carbon fuel use -- or else
By Ross Gelbspan
In 1995, a panel of the world's leading climate
scientists declared that unless humanity cuts its use
of coal and oil by 70 percent toward the end of this
century, the world will suffer significant
disruptions from global warming toward the end of
this century.
Just six years later, that same body, the U.N.sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), declared that the warming had
"already affected physical and biological systems"
in many areas of the world -- a finding which
"should sound alarm bells in every national capital
and every local community," according to the UN's
top environmental official.
What's truly alarming -- aside from the totally
unexpected speed of these changes -- is the fact that
most leaders are just beginning to accept the reality
of global warming. Most still think we have far
more time to begin to wean the world off oil and
coal.
Those groups include not only the Bush
administration, but also the mainstream media. For
years, the press has cast the issue of global
warming as a debate -- thanks to the public
relations experts of big coal and big oil who insisted
journalists "balance" the findings of the IPCC with
pronouncements of a handful of dissident
researchers, most of whom were on the payroll of
the fossil fuel industry.
Today, all bets are off.
As a result, the press accorded the same weight to
the industry-sponsored naysayers as they did to the
IPCC -- which represents the largest and most
rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in
history.
In January, the famed British ecologist James
Lovelock declared that we have already passed the
"point of no return." Others, including NASA'S
James Hansen, one of the world's pre-eminent
climate scientists, think we still have about a 10
year grace period in which to make major changes.
Today the calculus is changing; some press titans
like Time magazine and ABC News are taking note
of scientists' new urgency. Time's recent cover on
global warming warned: "Be worried. Be very
worried." But that warning seems to have been
ignored by America's political leaders.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, also sees a
10-year timeline and says dramatic cuts in carbon
fuel use must be made "if humanity is to survive."
Added British climate expert Peter Cox: "The
scientific agenda has moved from improving
predictions to thinking about . . . the chances of
something awful happening."
Instead, the President followed his recent call to
overcome our "addiction to oil" by promoting auto
efficiency standards which would amount to less
than 2 miles a gallon for certain light trucks over
the next five years -- and exempt nearly 80 percent
of all SUV's and small trucks from stricter standards
altogether.
By contrast, the current Kyoto Protocol, which was
essentially rendered comatose by the Bush
Administration two years ago, calls for emissions
cuts of a mere 8 percent by industrial countries by
2012.
Even environmental groups are unwilling to sound
the alarm clearly -- in good part because they work
in Washington, where most change is a matter of
slow negotiation -- but also because they're afraid
of being marginalized. It is, after all, hard to tell
Americans just how much change is needed when
they're only now understanding that change is
needed at all.
Why the new urgency? Planetary changes which
were supposed to occure toward the end of the
century, according to scientific computer models,
are actually happening today. Dr. Paul Epstein, a
leading climate researcher at Harvard Medical
School, citing the rapid intensification of storms
around the world, said: "We are seeing [storm]
impacts today that were previously projected to
occur in 2080."
Other examples include:



The Greenland ice sheet, one of the largest
glaciers on the planet, is melting from above
and losing its stability as meltwater from the
surface trickles down and lubricates the
bedrock on which the ice sheet sits. Should that
ice sheet slide into the ocean, it would raise sea
levels on the order of 20 feet. The rate of sea
level rise has already doubled in the last
decade as a result of melting glaciers and the
thermal expansion of warming oceans.
The proportion of severely destructive
hurricanes that have reached category 4 and 5
intensity has doubled in the past thirty years,
fueled by rising surface water temperatures.
Oceans are becoming acidified from the fallout
of our fossil fuel emissions. The ph level of the
world's oceans has changed more in the last
100 years than it did in the previous 10,000
years.
Those troubling signals are made all the more
disturbing by the fact that climate change does not
necessarily follow a linear, incremental trajectory.
As the climate system crosses invisible thresholds,
it is capable of large-scale, unpredictable leaps.
"There are tipping points out there that could be
passed before we're halfway through the century,"
said Tim Lenton, an earth systems modeller at
Britain's University of East Anglia.
That reality is compounded by the fact that carbon
dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas, stays in the
atmosphere for at least 100 years. Some of the
impacts that are surfacing today were likely
triggered by carbon emitted in the 1980s, before
the recent burst of carbon-powered development in
China, India, Mexico, Nigeria and other developing
countries.
And then there is the problem of "feedback loops,"
which means that small changes caused by
warming can trigger other much larger changes.
For example, the Siberian and Alaskan tundras,
which for centuries absorbed carbon dioxide and
methane, are now thawing and releasing those
gases back into the atmosphere. A rapid release of
greenhouse gases from these regions could trigger
a spike in warming.
Scientists recently detected a weakening of the
flow of ocean currents in the Atlantic basin because
of an infusion of freshwater from melting sea ice
and glaciers. At a certain point, they say, the change
in salinity and water density could change the
direction of ocean currents, leading to much more
bitter and severe winters in northern Europe and
North America.
In the face of these changes, the press remains
largely in denial. The environmental movement
seems to have gone into hibernation. And the Bush
Administration has turned its back on the
challenge. We are, as the British paper, The
Independent, put it, "sleepwalking into an
Apocalypse."
The countries of the world need to join together in a
project to rewire the world with clean energy as
quickly as humanly possible. Otherwise, our history
as a civilized species will soon be truncated by the
momentum of runaway climate change.
Look out the window. Time's up.
© Ross Gelbspan
--------------------------------------------------Ross Gelbspan, a 30-year-journalist, is author of
The Heat Is On (1998) and Boiling Point (2004) and
maintains the website: www.heatisonline.org. He
wrote this article for Perspective.
Deep ice tells long climate story
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, Norwich
Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at any time in the last 800,000
years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.
The in-depth analysis of air bubbles trapped in a 3.2km-long core of frozen snow shows current
greenhouse gas concentrations are unprecedented.
The East Antarctic core is the longest, deepest ice column yet extracted.
Project scientists say its contents indicate humans could be bringing about dangerous climate changes.
"My point would be that there's nothing in the ice core that gives us any cause for comfort," said Dr
Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
"There's nothing that suggests that the Earth will take care of the increase in carbon dioxide. The ice
core suggests that the increase in carbon dioxide will definitely give us a climate change that will be
dangerous," he told BBC News.
The Antarctic researcher was speaking here at the British Association's (BA) Science Festival.
Slice of history
The ice core comes from a region of the White Continent known as Dome Concordia (Dome C). It has
been drilled out by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica), a 10-country consortium.
The column's value to science is the tiny pockets of ancient air that were locked into its millennia of
accumulating snowflakes.
Each slice of this now compacted snow records a moment in Earth history, giving researchers a direct
measure of past environmental conditions.
Not only can scientists see past concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane - the two principal
human-produced gases now blamed for global warming - in the slices, they can also gauge past
temperatures from the samples.
This is done by analysing the presence of different types, or isotopes, of hydrogen atom that are found
preferentially in precipitating water (snow) when temperatures are relatively warm.
'Scary' rate
Earlier results from the Epica core were published in 2004 and 2005, detailing the events back to
440,000 years and 650,000 years respectively. Scientists have now gone the full way through the
column, back another 150,000 years.
The picture is the same: carbon dioxide and temperature rise and fall in step.
"Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide
changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity
has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range," explained Dr Wolff.
The "scary thing", he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core,
the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of
roughly 1,000 years.
"The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we
don't have an analogue in our records," he said.
Natural buffer
The plan now is to try to extend the ice-core record even further back in time. Scientists think another
location, near to a place known as Dome A (Dome Argus), could allow them to sample atmospheric
gases up to a million and a half years ago.
Some of the increases in carbon dioxide will be alleviated by natural "sinks" on the land and in the
oceans, such as the countless planktonic organisms that effectively pull carbon out of the atmosphere
as they build skeletons and shell coverings.
But Dr Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and BAS, warned the festival that these sinks
may become less efficient over time.
We could not rely on them to keep on buffering our emissions, she said.
"For example, we don't know what the effect will be of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems. There
is potential for deterioration," she explained.
More CO2 absorbed by the oceans will raise their acidity, and a number of recent studies have
concluded that this will eventually disrupt the ability of marine micro-organisms to use the calcium
carbonate in the water to produce their hard parts.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm
Published: 2006/09/04 22:27:27 GMT