Last Friday's edition of NOW on PBS asks, "Is a coastal catastrophe approaching, and what should we be doing about it?" It specifically addresses the issue of flooding in Bangladesh, currently the 7th most populous country on the planet and one of the most densely populated (1063 per sq km). (The next most populous country is Russia with a mere 8.4 per sq km!) Featured is Dr A. Atiq Rahman, the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) and a Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Chapter-19 on “Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change”, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr Rahman says terms like Global Warming and Climate Change are deceptively euphemistic, and says Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization is much more accurate and impactful. Where I come from, people might say, "It's time to get the finger out!"
You can watch the segment below. I recommend you view the NOW page also, as the comments are enlightening. For instance, commenterForrest M. Mims III says,"... land subsidence alone may account for an elevation change of -30 cm over the past several decades," which for me is in the category of "things you never thought of".
You can view the video (recommended), hear the audio and read the transcript.
This is an excellent report on the flooding of Bangladesh and the impact of even a modest rise in sea level of just a few feet, a process which seems already to have begun. The consensus is that such a rise is quite within the realm of possibility (for an intelligent overview, see, for example, http://urltea.com/31jrand click the Go button).
In Bangladesh, they get it from both sides, the rising ocean on the coast, and the increasing expansion and flooding of their major rivers owing to increased runoff from snow melting in the Himalayas. The latter leads to major flooding in central areas within Bangladesh. indeed, a good half of the entire country has the potential to flood as land-based ice melts around the globe.
For some perspective, Bangladesh occupies an area of 144 km² , about the same size as New York state (142 km²). The US itself is about 9.6 million km² . The population of Bangladesh (about 150 million) is about half that of the United States. The aforementioned flooding has the potential to displace a good half of the population of Bangladesh, 70 million people! As this climate change progresses, irrespective of the cause, we can expect massive population shifts globally during the current century. Massive opportunities exist to prepare for and capitalize on the increasing need for goods, services, transportation, distribution, housing, etc.
Think big, think bigger, plan, do. Involve other people.
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