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.
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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.