If you recall the classic, Ebenezer Scrooge was visited on Christmas Eve by the ghosts of his life, one each for the few pleasures and many sins of his past, present, and future. In the dream, Scrooge walked the days of his life, guided by his other-worldly chaperones – scariest of which was the Ghost of Christmas Future, who foretold of grave and dismal days ahead with the dragging of his ghastly chains – clank, clank, clank.
I feel in some small measure, in the midst of this trip to Bangladesh, that I have seen the Ghost of Christmas future, and it scares me as much as it did poor Scrooge.
No the heat hasn’t gotten to me. The ghost I speak of is that not of personal redemption or damnation, but rather of climate change – the Ghost of What Happens When You Overpopulate, Pollute, and Radically Alter the Earth without thought of its effect on Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchett, or anyone else at all.
There was an article in today’s paper here that set me off. It predicted that the trend in global warming would spark many more cyclones in years to come – and of much worse intensity than those that have already ravaged this country. It’s a shocking thought, given the numbers. I have been spending this week down in the south, where Cyclone Sidr came ashore in November 2007, completely destroying more than 363,000 homes, and affecting a staggering 8.9 million people. It killed 3,363 people – another 800 plus are still missing, which means dead in the world of super cyclones. By Bangladeshi standards, 4,100 deaths is a dramatic improvement looking back at history. A 1991 cyclone killed – killed – 700,000 people here. An even bigger one in 1971 – the year of Bangladesh’s independence – killed one million people, and that at a time when the entire population was a scant 70 million.
I say scant because to understand what rush hour will look like on the Capital Beltway in 2050, look at Bangladesh today. Home to 70 million in 1971, Bangladesh now hosts 153 million people – the third largest Muslim country in the world behind Indonesia and Pakistan. To get a feel for what that looks like, stuff just over half of the entire US population into Iowa, then flood it several times a year.
And I’m not kidding. Geographically, Bangladesh is about the size of Iowa – slightly smaller, actually. As a flood plain for the Asian sub-continent, Bangladesh is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, quite literally. Each year, massive cyclones threaten the coastal south – which, according to today’s paper, the country only has more of to look forward to.
Last week, the Republican National Convention was interrupted by Hurricane Gustov, which threw the convention into last minute fits of reorganizing, and forced the Katrina-scarred Mayor of New Orleans to evacuate the entire city, as a precaution. Even as Gustov ran out of steam, two other hurricanes were lining up to wreak havoc across the Caribbean and the eastern and southern US. Cuba got slammed, as did Haiti, where 137 people were killed, most of them in the city of Gonaives – where I spent two weeks a few years ago, covering, you guessed it, a massive flood caused by a hurricane.
But here was other news today in the same local paper. According to a global climate research center, the earth average temperature rose by 1.4 degree Fahrenheit from 1906 to 2005. If you believe in global warming, as I do, that slight change was enough to throw things seriously out of whack. Ask a polar bear. So imagine what another eight degrees of warming will do. That’s what the same research predicts might be the rise in temperature by the year 2100 – 92 short years from now.
I can imagine, because all I have to do is look out the window of my guesthouse, right now. 35% of Bangladesh’s 153 million people live on less than 800 calories a day. Picture 800 calories – that’s what you snack on while you’re preparing breakfast in America. Now live on it, day in and day out, for the rest of your life, adding in 16-hour days of exhausting physical labor, seven days a week, with no health care.
That’s not the fault of global warming – entirely. But food production suffers when cyclones, strengthened by the warmer water they storm across, flood huge swaths of land, farther inland and more frequently than they ever have before. Pooled water breeds mosquitoes, which thrive in the warmer weather, and malaria has a field day. You get the picture.
I know there are people out there who don’t believe global warming is man made. One of them is even running for vice president of the United States. But I can’t pass through Asia, and see what I’ve seen, without a cold shiver running up and down my spine. Maybe I’m just a bit too negative today. Maybe a shower and some food will help. But I fear that for too long we’ve been waking up on Christmas morning, and thinking it was all just a dream.
Clank, clank, clank.
September 13th, 2008 | by David in Travel
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
