Is This What the Future Looks Like?

Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma this weekend, leaving as many as 60,000 missing or dead and millions displaced. A massive sea surge, shown here, engulfed the low-lands and stretched tens of kilometers inland as far as the capitol, Rangoon, in the red box.

For more information on the path and effects of the storm, click here.

From the scientific community, is this a sign of climate change? No singular weather event can be called climate change, but whether there is a measurable increase in the frequency of such storms as this, Katrina and Gonu on the Arabian peninsula last year is still an object of contention. See the National Post for arguments on both sides, but I think we’re all pretty clear that there’s more of this coming.

Lastly, a recent report noted that climate change will affect tropical species as much as arctic ones. The loss of wetlands and rich coastal ecosystems is yet another worry.

2 Responses to “Is This What the Future Looks Like?”


  1. 1 Andy May 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am

    Note that most of the inundated lands were rice fields. Rice is grown well on flat, low-lying deltaic coasts such as is found in my home near Houston. These, most productive lands are going to be lost to sea level rise fairly quickly under almost all AGW scenarios. Many tens of thousands of acres of rice fields were lost near Beaumont Texas when water and oil withdrawal caused the land to sink. These fields lay between 5 and 9 feet in elevation and so haven’t been inundated by sea water, but they lost enough elevation that they could no longer be drained for planting and harvest.

  1. 1 To Fight or Not to Fight? One Climate Activist’s Coal Dilemma « It’s Getting Hot In Here Trackback on May 19th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

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About Morgan


Morgan was recently a senior at Williams College. There, he was a Chinese major, student body co-president and one of the leaders of Thursday Night Group, the campus climate action group. Since graduating, Morgan worked on a community energy efficiency campaign in western Mass, co-directed NH SPROG for the SSC and worked on Power Vote in Cleveland for 2 months. He then left for China for 2 months where his interests have been turned to for-profit models of change and specifically solar hot water systems.

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