Rezaul Karim Chowdhury: Water on the brain

–Financial Express, 3 September 2012–

Rezaul Karim Chowdhury from EquityBD Bangladesh said,

No deep cut now means mass carbon genocide to least developed countries, especially possible extinction of small island countries like Bangladesh, the Maldives, the Philippines etc.”

The United States, the EU and other Annex I countries have already accepted their responsibility to the climate crisis. The next logical and imperative thing to do is to fulfill their existing legally binding commitments and undertaking drastic emission cuts without offsets. No more skirting the issue. No more excuses. They need to act now,

Bangladesh: an island? Look at the map Mr Choudhury. Bangladesh seems to have longer borders with India than coastline.

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/river-sediment-may-counter-bangladesh-sea-level-rise.html

Bangladesh may avoid losing a predicted fifth of its land to rising sea levels because of accumulated sediment being washed down by Himalayan rivers, according to scientists.

Researchers at the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), in capital city Dhaka, said that the Himalayas — relatively young mountains with a loose structure — have been losing more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year, some of which has been building up the land in the river estuaries below.

The team presented its work at a seminar on the impact of climate change on rivers organised by BRAC, Bangladesh’s largest non-governmental organisation, in Dhaka last month (22 April).

The scientists say the results challenge predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a one-metre sea level rise could submerge a fifth of the country.

http://bittooth.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/bangladesh-sea-levels-land-sinks-more.html

When the effects of Global Warming are discussed, the ongoing saga of the people that live in Bangladesh is quite frequently used as a graphic illustration of the fate that faces all those who live close to the ocean, especially those in low-lying areas.

Two problems are generally used to illustrate the problems, the fact that the water is rising, both covering and eroding the area in which people can live forms one part, and secondly the invasion of salt water into the ground beneath the settlements displaces drinking water. And while the situation is made worse each year when the monsoons come and rivers rise (for example 2000;2002; 2004; 2007) it is an ongoing problem throughout the year.

However, while the blame for the rise in sea level (it is around 5.4 mm per year) is almost always ascribed purely to the rising sea levels due to global warming, in actual fact the sea is rising at only 1.4 mm/year, a rate which it has stayed the same in the Bay of Bengal for over forty years, and the majority of the problem is caused because the area in question is a river delta, and the ground is subsiding by about 4 mm/year. Neither of these is directly caused by greenhouse gas effects.