Global Drowning

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More than 130 key port cities worldwide were analysed to investigate the likely impact of climate change alongside subsidence, population growth, and urban economic development.

The study focused on the exposure of people and property and infrastructure to a 1-in-100 year flood event now and in the future. The cities most exposed to coastal flooding today and in the future were ranked into a league table.

London was ranked 41 in a list for population exposed in 2070 and 27th for property and infrastructure assets exposed.

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Over the coming decades, the unprecedented growth and development of the Asian mega-cities will be a key factor in driving the increase in coastal flood risk globally. In terms of population exposure, Calcutta will be closely followed by Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Bangkok and Rangoon. Miami is in ninth place and would be the only top 10 city situated in a currently developed country, while Hai Phong (Vietnam) is ranked tenth.

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50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy

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His very precise measurements produced a remarkable data set, which first sounded alarm bells over the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, and eventually led to the tracking of greenhouse gases worldwide.

The curve set the scene for the debate over climate change, and policies, sometimes controversial, that address the human contribution to the greenhouse effect.

"It wasn't until Keeling came along and started measuring CO2 that we got the evidence that CO2 was increasing from human activities," says Professor Andrew Watkinson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.

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Arctic Ice shrinks by an Alaska plus a Texas

The number of people made homeless by flooding in north-east India and Bangladesh has risen to some 1.5 million, officials say.

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India's Assam state is suffering its third wave of floods this year, caused by heavy rains over the past four days.

The army has evacuated 800,000 people as the Brahmaputra rive and its tributaries flow at danger levels.

Downstream in Bangladesh, officials say half a million people are affected and many have been moved to safer places.

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Arctic Ice Continues Record Melting

Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes

· Estimates of sea-level rise out of date, say scientists
· Religious leaders pray for planet at Greenland glacier
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The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."

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Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.

He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist, said the quakes were triggered because ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years. The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never happened before in north-west Greenland and showed potential for the entire ice sheet to collapse.

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Another Super Storm Kills People

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Officials are only now uncovering the scale of devastation caused by Felix, which hit land as a maximum strength category five storm on Tuesday.

"It is worse than we previously thought," Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said as he met officials.

"Many families stayed in their homes. There are many victims, many dead."

Nicaragua bore the brunt of the hurricane, with winds of up 256km/h (160mph). Neighbouring Honduras was hit mainly by flooding.

Aid agencies are struggling to reach the worst-affected area, around the Nicaraguan town of Puerto Cabezas. In one case, soldiers distributed food to a remote village where residents had been surviving on nothing but coconuts.

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Loss of Arctic ice: Satellite imagery shows the melting is happening much faster than climate models had predicted.

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At this rate, a complete melting of Arctic sea ice could happen by 2030 - far sooner than expected.

"We've been seeing this loss of ice. What has greatly surprised us is how quickly we are losing it," said Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the center, who led a team of six analyzing new satellite imagery received Friday.

"This is telling us the Arctic is on a fast-track of change. It may well be unstoppable ...," Serreze said. "The numbers that come to us day-to-day leave us agog, ... somewhat blue, yes. This is disturbing stuff we are seeing."

Arctic sea ice keeps polar regions cool and helps control the global climate, reflecting sunlight back into space. As the ice melts in summer, oceans heat up. Scientists at the center here in Colorado measure the amount of sea ice using imagery from U.S. Department of Defense satellites delivered by NASA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation support the monitoring.

Five years ago, 2070 was thought to be the soonest a total summer meltdown was possible, based on the computer modeling scientists worldwide use to try to anticipate global climate change.

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13 die as floodwaters inundate Midwest

108 Die in Bangladesh Mudslides, Floods

The heaviest recorded rainfall levels in seven years have also inundated parts of the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.

Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is buffeted by cyclones and floods that kill hundreds each year. A powerful cyclone in 1991 killed 139,000 people.

Densely populated and grindingly poor, the country is filled with slums that are particularly vulnerable -- the one hit in Chittagong was home to 700 people, most of them migrant workers and their families who lived in clusters of straw-and-bamboo or mud-and-tin shanties built on the slope of hill, survivors said.

Dulu Mia Munshi, a rickshaw puller, said he lost five family members, including his wife and two young sons.

"There was a sudden rush of mud and water, and our home was swept away," Munshi told The Associated Press by telephone from his hospital bed. Five other neighboring shanties on a slope were also washed away.

Thunder? It's the sound of Greenland melting

Swiss-born Steffen is one of dozens of scientists who have peppered the Greenland ice cap with instruments to measure temperature, snowfall and the movement, thickness and melting of the ice.

Since 1990, Steffen has spent two months a year at Swiss Camp, a wind-swept outpost of tents on the ice cap, where he and other researchers brave temperatures of minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit) to scrutinize Greenland's climate change clues.

The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean. The glacier Swiss Camp rests on has doubled its speed to about 15 km (9 miles) a year in the last 12 years, just as its tongue retreated 10 km into the fjord.

"It is scary," said Steffen. "This is only Greenland. But Antarctica and glaciers around the world are responding as well."

Hundreds of millions of livelihoods will be affected by declining snow and ice cover as a result of global warming, a UN report has warned.

The study warns of a range of threats that could destabilise ecosystems around the world, with potentially devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of people.

Melting glaciers in Asia's mountains could affect an estimated 40% of the world's population, who rely on ice melt for crop irrigation and drinking water.

It added that rising temperatures were already resulting in the thawing of permafrost in places such as Siberia. This was leading to the release into the atmosphere of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The fate of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which hold almost all of the planet's freshwater ice, needed to be better understood, the UN publication urged.
It said that if emissions of greenhouse gases continued unabated, the massive ice sheets were likely to become unstable as the world continued to warm.

Without taking measures to mitigate sea level rise, an estimated 145 million people, primarily in Asia, would be exposed to the risk of flooding.

Sea Levels and Stuff

Wonder what these people did, or these, when the sea came to swallow their cities?

We know what the good folk of New Orleans, Louisiana did. They starved and dehydrated trapped on their roof tops. They died from treatable disease, though even under normal conditions such death is increasingly common in Amerikkka. They whirled away in the rushing waters to drown.

Or they simply drowned while waiting, like the old people awaiting federally coordinated rescue from national guard troops, troops who were unavailable because they were themselves busy dying in Iraq in the BushCon, greed driven, preemptive, illegal invasion and occupation for oil and power.

So, awaiting a rescue that never came, the old folks drowned inside nursing homes while Brownie emailed about his wardrobe and ate a real meal, one to sustain a workin' man, and Bush played Night Ranger records on his dude ranch, because he isn't smart enough to fiddle, and Chertoff hissed while trimming his goatee.

Of course, regarding NOLA, the racist reports blaring across the telescreen night after night, the racist misrepresentation of actions there, further dulled the dim response of rescuers, who were afraid of being killed by looting, shooting, pillaging, savage, southern po-dark folk, who were really just people trying to survive.

Though I'm convinced hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and other energetic expressions of nature's opinion played a part in many coastal mass drownings, I'm even more convinced previous abrupt increases in sea level may have been helped along by rapidly melting polar ice caps, but not ones liquefied by the waste of human over consumption of petrochemicals, like ours are being, as we become the methane planet.

The environment altering dependence on and over consumption of petrochemicals that contributed to the unusually active season of enormous hurricanes in the gulf will bring the would to it's knees sooner rather than later, yet little is being done to tap energy from alternate sources because the capitalist market place doesn't work that way.

Oil companies have the bucks, bought the white house, the congress, wars of choice and make policy on what to do about the decline in avaialbity of cheap energy. Heat from war, from fossil fuel consumption, from greed, turn up the greenhouse effect and accelerate the other environmental processes and events that are likely to pound us back into an ice age or drown us.

Much has already been lost to the maw of the sea. The earth does, after all, have a primarily fluid surface. It is, no doubt, our point of origin, or at least the soup we cooked in, if we, say, came from outer space on a comet, as aggressive, snarling, little microbes marauding the universe at the behest of the true overmind, DNA, then evolved slowly into the fine, environment destroying primates we are today.

Maybe the sea simply wishes us back, though I know the remaining whales and dolphins must be mighty nervous about our presence.

Did the ubiquitous flood myth emerge from a sudden rise in sea levels, one that wiped out coastal cities in cultures that had not yet invented writing? The story of the flood is told in mythologies from all around the world, a ubiquity that alone serves as confirmation to lunk headed, sexually suspicious, suppressed Christians that the jealous, angry Phallus god invented the world 7000 years ago, had Adam walk around with Sauropods and Raptors and Eve on a leash, mind you, then wiped out his invention by flood, in typical father god overkill, shortly there after.

How will we mythologize the drowning of New York? Or Hong Kong? Or all around the Mediterranean? If we allow Pat Robertson to be our story teller, or myth maker, it will be a story of punishment for sodomy and racial mixing, a story that includes assassination and instructions for a proper place for women.

With so many people enabled to participate in such a narrative of mass cultural experience, since we are a literate, technologically sophisticated, "advanced" society that can write and film and videotape, and since we know it's coming, how will we tell it? Will we pack it with truth or will we lace it with lies like the ones we told about the presidency of Ronald RayGun when he died?

Who has control of the story?

How could the wide spread natural events of the past be spun by Judeo-christian culture into a confused tale of Noah and his ark and his sons and pairs of animals, when the average reader doesn't even realize there are two tales woven into one there, when the average reader can't tell a raven froma dove, and the average religious Amerikkkan thinks these events literally occurred?

It is a result of who got control of the telling.

But now all our stories are run through the machine of a vast corporate media with a right wing agenda, a media that has repeatedly failed to tell the truth, find the truth, check the fact, ask the question, report the story; a tampered with media that still has the capacity to reach and influence more people than at any other time in history.

We are falling through the Winston Smith's memory hole.

How are we mythologizing the drowning of New Orleans? Who even thinks about that anymore? Does anyone talk about it in terms of ethnic cleansing, Halliburton's no bid contracts, suppressing wages, toxic quagmire, global warming, etc.?

When we tell the tale of the drowning of New Orleans will it include the simple truth that the republican party destroyed the federal emergency management agency by subsuming it under the do nothing department of homeland security, then appointed a blobby little titmouse, Michael Brown, to run FEMA, and a shady, sibilant snake, Michael Chertoff, to run DHS, when running DHS means nothing more than a job handing out pots of government money to Bush friends while doing absolutely nothing to secure the nation, because nothing can be done, since it is bad policy that brings terrorism upon it.

Will our mythic version of NOLA include the republican idea of making the federal government so small you can drown it in a bathtub, ala patriarchal felon, Grover Norquist, and bloating the military so big, we can't pay for it? Since messianic George Bush claims god told him to invade Iraq, will he hear god's message in Katrina, saying, "George, you're a no good, do nothing, mindless piece of trash and truly a son of a bitch! GET OUT!"?

Our telling, the one that becomes part of our national history/myth, needs to include at least these simple truths: A parasitic government, such as the one the republicans desire and strive for, is a danger to us all, our dependence on petrochemicals is delusional folly and we need to manage our behavior so as to live within the constraints of our environment if we are to survive.