Bangladesh Looks Into The Abyss - 1/2 Of Largest Island Gone In Past 10 Years, Salt Rising Steadily

[hatrack]

EDIT

Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is running out of time.

"It is clear from all the data we are gathering here in Bangladesh that the IPCC predictions were much too conservative," he said. He should know: he is one of the IPCC's leading members, and the UN has given him an award for his unusually prescient predictions. His work is used as one of the standard textbooks across the world, including at Oxford and Harvard. "We are facing a catastrophe in this country. We are talking about an absolutely massive displacement of human beings."

He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide".

The worst-case scenario, Dr Rahman said, is if one of the world's land-based ice-sheets breaks up. "Then we lose 70 to 80 per cent of our land, including Dhaka. It's a different world, and we're not on it. The evidence from Jim Hansen shows this is becoming more likely – and it can happen quickly and irreversibly. My best understanding of the evidence is that this will probably happen towards the end of the lifetime of babies born today." I walked out in the ceaseless churning noise of Dhaka. Everywhere I looked, people were building and making and living: my eyes skimmed up higher and higher and find more and more activity. A team of workers were building a house; behind and above them, children were sewing mattresses on a roof; behind and above them, more men were building taller buildings. This is the most cramped country on earth: 150 million people living in an area the size of Iowa. Could all this life really be continuing on the crumbling edge of a cliff?

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http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/environment/article3819427.ece

[phantom power]

1. "It's a different world, and we're not on it."

Zeitgeist for the 21st century.

[phantom power]

2. Has anybody done a study of loss of potable water as a function of sea level?

As in, "sea level rises 1 foot, humanity loses x% of its potable water supply, etc"

I bet that graph would be exciting.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. That's a good point. Another point that I never hear about is

that as the ocean eats countries, particularly the industrialized ones, won't it start to die faster from all the toxic waste and oil and everything else that will contaminate it? I read that it's already turning acidic, so that might just be the kick in the pants it needs to really start turning sour.

[phantom power]

6. That seems pretty plausible. I wonder how many landfills...

might get soaked with saltwater. Or drums of PCBs, etc. It's a safe bet that nobody sited any disposal sites with much thought toward hypothetical sea-level changes.

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. True, so even though some countries got smart and stopped using the ocean as a dumping ground

it might all turn out to be a moot point someday.

[emmadoggy]

13. That's the thing I keep wondering about too.

And I never really see any reference to it anywhere. But as cities are swallowed up, all that human stuff - gas, oil, chemicals, sewage, rotting buildings with insulation and all sorts of other stuff - gets assimilated into the ocean. It seems very likely to me that that will have an impact on our already fragile ocean environment.

[GreenPartyVoter]

14. Yep, I think there's no question of that, and I do wish someone would address it.

[GliderGuider]

3. "climatic genocide"

If we could get that image across to the world's consumers, maybe it would help.

[hatrack]

4. Good thing there aren't any Islamic radicals there with their ideological . . .

Oh, sorry, my bad!

EDIT

India is now trying to close down this option. On our last day in the south, we drove a few miles west from Islam's hometown, Satkhira, to the border post at Bhomra. Soldiers lounged around with guns. A line of colorful trucks waited for permission to cross. A few yards short of the barrier pole, a narrow dirt road branched away to the right, paralleling the frontier. Our Land Rover started to make the turn, but the officer in charge stepped over briskly and held up a hand. He considered our foreign faces, Len and Diane's cameras, walked back to the hut that served as his office, called his superiors for instructions. Then he put the phone down and shook his head. Not a chance. For what the road would have led us to is a newly completed stretch of the fence that India is constructing to keep out Bangladeshis, a double line of concrete posts and barbed wire. When it's finished, the fence will be 2,500 miles long, longer than the U.S.-Mexico border.

The fence idea has been around for years, but it's taken on new impetus in the last two or three. The reason: India's anxiety about terrorism. In 2002, a radical Islamist group machine-gunned the U.S. cultural center in Kolkata. Then, out of the blue, came a wave of several hundred bombings in Bangladesh -- including one suicide attack -- in the latter months of 2005. These incidents were attributed to a local jihadist group called Jamatul Mujahideen, the Party of Holy Warriors.

All of which brings us back to Osama bin Laden, and thence to a second safety hatch that has beckoned to Bangladeshis desperate to flee environmental degradation in the rural areas and urban collapse in the capital. I'd seen graphic evidence of this on my way to Dhaka, when I changed planes in the oil-rich emirate of Dubai. The airport is opulent beyond description, its main concourse lined with gigantic artificial palm trees and twinkling fairy lights, the only discordant note being the hundreds of Bangladeshi migrant workers curled up asleep on the floors. It's estimated that two million Bangladeshis are now employed in menial jobs in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Debt bondage is not too extreme a term for their condition; to get an employment visa, each must make an up-front payment of $2,000 or more to a recruiting agency. By the time their contracts expire, it's more than likely they will have been exposed to the fundamentalist Wahhabi, or Salafi, strain of Islam. This is a world that is well captured in the movie Syriana.

It's also a world that is antithetical to Islam as it has historically been practiced in Bangladesh, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, exceeded only by Indonesia and Pakistan. Islam here has always been of the moderate and peaceable variety. It is strongly shaped by Sufism, the mystical strain of the religion that emphasizes self-knowledge and the individual's closeness to God, and is often intermingled with the traditions of the minority Hindus, who make up a little more than 10 percent of the population.

EDIT

http://www.onearth.org/article/the-gathering-storm?page=4

[Speck Tater]

8. A long read, but well worth the time. NT

[nam78_two]

9. K&R.nt

[Chulanowa]

10. THe more I read on this, and other similar situations...

The more I come to the realization that national borders and artificially restricted migration are crimes against humanity. The people of Bangladesh need to move, to get out of the salt swamp their nation is becoming... And India and other nations are aiming hteir guns at them and saying no.

It seems that more and more nations are turning into prisons, ruined lands who's populations are forbidden to leave.

[Psyop Samurai]

11. Amazing article... k&r... nt

[Dead_Parrot]

12. I wonder if India's finished that wall, yet. nt