Is This What the Future Looks Like? « It’s Getting Hot In Here

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?”

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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 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

About Morgan

Morgan is a wandering climate activist, a job well suited to the editorial board of this site. He organized at Williams College until his aprubt and unfortunate graduation in 2008. 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, in no particular order, Morgan has worked on a community energy efficiency campaign in western Mass, co-directed NH SPROG for the SSC and worked on Power Vote in Cleveland. He spent traveled in China, networking with youth climate activists and learning about the solar hot water business. He worked on Long Island for a solar and wind company doing home evaluations and sales. And he spent the better part of a year in DC at the Avaaz Action Factory causing trouble for a good cause.