One of Britain’s leading climate change experts has said that
A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet
After last weeks poo-poo-ing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (that we’re sure will be poo-hoo-ed by The Deniers for weeks to come) Professor Jones should be prepared to catch his share of the idiocy, even if his predictions turn out to be 100% accurate.
It’s interesting to hear the rational and “science” The Deniers use to “debunk” the “bad science” of climate change.
Two of my favorites include the ‘if there is climate change it’s part of Gods plan and going against Gods plans for the world are sinful’ rational, and the ever popular scientific method of ‘if you put ice in a glass and fill it right to the very top with water the glass will not overflow even when the ice melts’.
To be discussing whether or not something significant is, or is not, happening, in the face of hard physical evidence is beyond stupidity.
Greenland is covered by roughly 2 million cubic kilometers of ice. That’s enough to rise sea level by 7 meters, writes John Collins Rudolf in the NY Times (16.1.2007). He visits Greenland with a team of scientists and reports on the new phenomenon that ice and glaciers are retreating and give free new islands that were formerly bound to the glacier. Its a dramatic effect of global warming and challenges cartographers which have to redraw maps, “geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created,” writes Rudolf. Greenland loses 240 cubic kilometers ice each year, and that’s three times the volume of all glaciers of the Alps
(emphasis mine)
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
(emphasis mine)
Seems pretty darned simple to me….. ice caps in Greenland melt off as a result of global warming and calve icebergs….. additional water in the oceans washes out islands in other places, and, in this case, 10,000 people become the first generation of climate change homeless.
Lohachara is not the only place. Stageleft has a regular reader in the island nation of Tuvalu, until s/he started visiting we didn’t know the island existed, but after a few hits we looked, and (among other interesting things) found that it is threatened by rising seas and may well disappear in a few years.
At this point they are losing land annually, the island is literally shrinking right in front of their eyes, and land used for growing food is disappearing just as quickly as it absorbs salt water and becomes unusable for crops.
The Deniers, either wrapped up in their cloak of ‘meddling with Gods plans is sinful’, afraid that their bottom line will be affected if they make any responsible changes, or those who simply admit defeat, shrug, and say ‘nobody else is doing anything so what positive effect could we possibly have’, could really give a rats ass about Lohachara, Tuvalu, or any other place on the planet as long as it’s not in their country or their region - sad as it is, that’s simple truth.
That’s why, as potentially harsh as it may seem, I want the day to come when the first western climate change homeless or climate change refugees appear on our TVs, in our newspapers, and on talk radio…. and I don’t want it to be a couple of farmers on one North American coast or another either, that wouldn’t work. As a society we’re far to selfish to care if it’s only a couple of farmers here and there, or some small fishing village no one has ever heard of, nope, I want it to be a good sized Western urban centre, some place where at least 25,000 westerners have to pack up their kit and go someplace else - because that is, I fear, the only way we’re going to actually pay attention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohachara
If climate warming proponents can’t be trusted to filter out the bullshit, every anecdote and piece of evidence submitted must have a question mark beside it until verified. If you’re not going to police your own side of the debate, don’t expect to convince the skeptics.