Seriously, instead of wars and rumors of war, the impending catastrophe that global warming and the present climate emergency represents, should be THE STORY of our times. Check out these predictions for Viet Nam, Thailand, Iraq, Kuwait, the cities of Mumbai, Shanghai, and Alexandria. This an incomplete, but helpful rendering.
The U.S. needs to stop isolating itself as a country, stop terrorizing our children and families in crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border, get about ending all wars, and address this impending climate crisis as a global community. All countries need to do this. One can only imagine how much war itself has contributed to the heating, let alone destruction, of the Earth. There is no "Planet B," my friends.
Consider reading David Wallace-Wells' book, “The Uninhabitable Earth” (here's the New York Magazine version; it's the most downloaded piece for the Magazine) to get informed and educated about the climate emergency that we're currently in.
With the rising temperature of the Earth, many bad things are still yet to come even if we ended all carbon emissions today. This doesn't mean that we still don't seek to end all carbon emissions, but rather that we try at this point as humanity to avert the worst of the foreseeable worst.
Now, it's a question of adaptation and preparing in ways suggested herein. This is dire, but there is always hope and we must push our political leadership at local, state, and national levels to prioritize ours and others' survival as a global and international community. After all, we ourselves may someday become "climate refugees."
-Angela Valenzuela
Rising seas could affect
three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new
research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal
cities.
The authors of a paper
published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation
based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea
level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too
optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living
on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.
Southern Vietnam could all but disappear.
The first map shows earlier
expectations of submerged land by 2050. But the new outlook, the second map,
indicates that the bottom part of the country will be underwater at high tide.
More than 20 million people
in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be
inundated.
Much of Ho Chi Minh City, the
nation’s economic center, would disappear with it, according to the research,
which was produced by Climate Central, a
science organization based in New Jersey, and published in the journal Nature Communications. The projections don’t account for
future population growth or land lost to coastal erosion.
Standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to
differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings, said
Scott A. Kulp, a researcher at Climate Central and one of the paper’s authors.
So he and Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central’s chief executive, used artificial
intelligence to determine the error rate and correct for it.
In Thailand, more than 10
percent of citizens now live on land that is likely to be inundated by 2050,
compared with just 1 percent according to the earlier technique. The political
and commercial capital, Bangkok, is particularly imperiled.
Climate change will put
pressure on cities in multiple ways, said Loretta Hieber Girardet, a Bangkok
resident and United Nations disaster risk-reduction official. Even as global
warming floods more places, it will also push poor farmers off the land to seek
work in cities.
“It is a dire formula,” she
said.
Land underwater at high tide
Populated area
Old projection for 2050
New projection for 2050
CHINA
Shanghai
East
China
Sea
In Shanghai, one of
Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of
the city and many other cities around it.
The findings don’t have
to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people
already live in places that are below the high tide line, which Mr. Strauss
attributes to protective measures like seawalls and other barriers. Cities must
invest vastly greater sums in such defenses, Mr. Strauss said, and they must do
it quickly.
But even if that investment
happens, defensive measures can go only so far. Mr. Strauss offered the example
of New Orleans, a city below sea level that was devastated in 2005 when its
extensive levees and other protections failed during Hurricane Katrina. “How
deep a bowl do we want to live in”? he asked.
Buildings
Land underwater at high tide
Old projection for 2050
New projection for 2050
INDIA
Mumbai
Arabian
Sea
The new projections
suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest
cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a
series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
Over all, the research
shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate
internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for
Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
“We’ve been trying to
ring the alarm bells,” Ms. Ionesco said. “We know that it’s coming.” There is
little modern precedent for this scale of population movement, she added.
Land underwater at high tide
Populated area
Old projection for 2050
New projection for 2050
Mediterranean
Sea
Alexandria
EGYPT
The disappearance of
cultural heritage could bring its own kind of devastation. Alexandria, Egypt,
founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C., could be lost to rising waters.
In other places, the
migration caused by rising seas could trigger or exacerbate regional conflicts.
Basra, the second-largest
city in Iraq, could be mostly underwater by 2050. If that happens, the effects
could be felt well beyond Iraq’s borders, according to John Castellaw, a
retired Marine Corps lieutenant general who was chief of staff for United
States Central Command during the Iraq War.
Land underwater at high tide
Populated area
Old projection for 2050
New projection for 2050
IRAQ
Basra
Persian
Gulf
KUWAIT
Further loss of land to
rising waters there “threatens to drive further social and political
instability in the region, which could reignite armed conflict and increase the
likelihood of terrorism,” said General Castellaw, who is now on the advisory
board of the Center for Climate and Security, a research and advocacy group in
Washington.
“So this is far more than
an environmental problem,” he said. “It’s a humanitarian, security and possibly
military problem too.”
Population data from WorldPop and building footprints from
OpenStreetMap.
