First, about the floods in Pakistan, an article by Carlotta Gall:
Floodwaters surged deeper into areas of southern Pakistan on Sunday, forcing thousands more people to abandon their homes in haste and flee to higher ground. Attention has now focused on the province of Sindh, as the floods that have torn through the length of the country for three weeks finally move toward the Arabian Sea.Rico says Sir Charles Napier's famous one-word telegram, Peccavi, or "We have sinned", referring to the capture of Sindh, might apply here...
Water reached within half a mile of Shadad Kot, a town of 150,000 people, on Sunday afternoon, and several nearby villages were already cut off when a protective embankment began to give way, Yasin Shar, the district coordination officer of Shadad Kot, said by telephone. Most of the population had been evacuated and more were still leaving, he said. “We are trying to save the embankment and keep on repairing wherever it is damaged, but the water is flowing with a lot of pressure,” Mr. Shar said. “We hope the embankment won’t break. We are praying.”
Nearly five million people have been displaced from the worst flooding ever recorded in Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands are being housed in orderly tented camps set up in army compounds, schools and other public buildings, but thousands more are living on roadsides and canal embankments, spreading out mats under the trees or making shade over the simple rope beds they brought with them.
The town of Sukkur is overflowing with an influx of displaced people. On the edge of the town, a group of 15 families with scores of children are camped along the Dadu Canal. Their mood is edgy, and they race in a horde after any vehicle that slows in the hope that it bears food or assistance. One woman showed her fractured arm, the result of a tussle for food.
“People are looting, people run after trucks snatching things,” said Shad Mohammad, 28, a shopkeeper and father of five, who came here after his town, Ghospur, was flooded fifteen days ago. “People come, sometimes the government comes, or charities with food. Sometimes you get something, sometimes not.”
The children are often hungry and crying, Mr. Mohammad said. “We don’t know what will happen to us; we have lost everything,” he said. “We have nothing here, just the clothes we are wearing.”
He and others spoke of their anxiety that, because Sindh is so low-lying, it will take months for the waters to subside, and for them to return home. And they know they will return to nothing. The water was up to their necks, so their mud-brick houses will have collapsed and their animals drowned, they said. Surviving would be difficult without assistance, and few expressed confidence they would receive much.
The older people were more resigned. “We will sit under the sky, and God will provide what he wills,” said Qaim Din, 50, a father of eight, who had to abandon his donkey and a buffalo as the family fled the rising waters.
The younger men expressed anger and impatience. “We are not living here happily,” said another man, also named Qaim Din but not related. A fertilizer dealer, he came here after his village 125 miles away was flooded. “We are angry, and they are treating us like animals,” he said. “You are talking of anger, we are sometimes thinking of killing this government,” he said. “If you go further along this road, you will see people, you will see their faces, they are hurting.”
Jamshaid Khan Dasti, a member of Parliament from a neighboring constituency in Punjab Province, said, “Food is creating a law-and-order situation because there is no proper system to look after these people.” There were already episodes of looting and burglary, and Mr. Dasti said he had asked the government to deploy paramilitary rangers to prevent the situation from further deteriorating. The majority of the displaced were falling outside the humanitarian net, he said. In his district, 800,000 people were displaced, but only 100,000 were being provided for in camps. “The rest are scattered, stuck in different places and they don’t have food or water,” Mr. Dasti said.
A former prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a member of Parliament whose constituency in neighboring Baluchistan was 90 percent underwater, warned that the mood would only worsen. “These people will be out in the streets, this is what I see,” he said. “I have been through many floods, in 1956, 1973, 1976, and 2007, but I have never seen a government less bothered.” He added, “The state is a failure, and the people will come out, and naturally nothing can stop the wave of people.” Asked if he was talking about a revolution, he said: “Yes. We are heading toward that, very fast.”
Second, about the floods in China, an article by David Barboza:
More than 250,000 people were evacuated in northeastern China over the weekend after torrential rains battered the area and led to severe flooding along the border with North Korea, Chinese state media reported on Monday. The government said that four people were killed and one was missing near the port city of Dandong in the northeastern province of Liaoning after some of the worst flooding to hit the region in decades.
Emergency crews worked beginning Saturday into Sunday to move the estimated 253,500 people, the Xinhua news agency reported.
China has been suffering from severe flooding in various parts of the country for months, and is still trying to cope with massive mudslides that killed at least 1,400 people this month in Gansu Province, in the northwestern part of the country. The heavy rains in North China over the weekend flooded the Yalu River, which separates China from North Korea, forcing the river to breach its banks, China’s state-run news media reported.
In North Korea, flooding submerged much of Sinuiju. The North Korean state-run media said Sunday that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, had mobilized military forces to rescue and evacuate thousands of North Koreans from floods that hit Sinuiju, the isolated country’s major trading gate on its border with China. The North’s Korean Central News Agency said that about a foot of rain had fallen around Sinuiju from midnight until 9 a.m. Saturday. The agency reported “severe damage” and said that 5,150 people had been evacuated to higher ground. It reported no deaths. Sinuiju forms a vital lifeline for the North’s impoverished economy. Much of the country’s land traffic with China, its main trading partner, travels trough Sinuiju. Since the mid-1990s, North Korea’s agricultural sector has often been devastated by both floods and drought. After decades of denuding its hills for firewood, North Korea remains vulnerable to landslides and flash floods.
In the Chinese province of Liaoning, the floodwaters damaged five border cities, destroying or damaging thousands of homes and buildings and causing at least $100 million in losses, the government said. The heavy rains began pounding Liaoning Province on Thursday and did not let up until Saturday. But, the government said Sunday, another wave of heavy rains was expected to worsen the situation.
Third, about the polar icecaps, an article by Thomas Homer-Dixon:
Standing on the deck of the Louis S. St-Laurent, a floating laboratory for Arctic science, part of Canada’s Coast Guard fleet and one of the world’s most powerful icebreakers, I can see vivid evidence of climate change. Channels through the Canadian Arctic archipelago that, just two decades ago, were choked with ice at this time of year, are now expanses of open water or vast patchworks of tiny islands of melting ice.Rico says we all need to say this in unison: We're screwed. The only questions are when and how much. The answers, unfortunately, are probably 'soon' and 'a lot'...
In 1994, the “Louie,” as the crew calls the ship, and a United States Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Sea, smashed their way to the North Pole through thousands of miles of pack ice six- to nine-feet thick. “The sea conditions in the Arctic Ocean were rarely an issue for us in those days, because the thick continuous ice kept waves from forming,” Marc Rothwell, the Louie’s captain, told me. “Now, there’s so much open water that we have to account for heavy swells that undulate through the sea ice. It’s almost like a dream: the swells move in slow motion, like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere.”
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer.
At the same time, warm Pacific Ocean water is pulsing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic basin, helping melt a large area of sea ice between Alaska and eastern Siberia. Scientists are just beginning to learn how this exposed water has changed the movement of heat energy and major air currents across the Arctic basin, in turn producing winds that push remaining sea ice down the coasts of Greenland into the Atlantic.
Globally, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. In regions around the world, indications abound that earth’s climate is quickly changing, like the devastating mudslides in China and weeks of searing heat in Russia. But in the world’s capitals, movement on climate policy has nearly stopped.
Democrats in the Senate decided last month that they wouldn’t push for approval of a climate bill. In Canada, Australia, Japan and countries across Europe, the global economic crisis and other near-term concerns have pushed climate issues to the back burner. For China and India, economic growth and energy security are more vital priorities.
Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough. Many factors have conspired to produce this situation. Human beings are notoriously poor at responding to problems that develop incrementally. And most of us aren’t eager to change our lifestyles by sharply reducing our energy consumption.
But social scientists have identified another major reason: Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls “protective cognition”— we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment. Powerful special interests like the coal and oil industries have learned how to halt movement on climate policy by exploiting the fear people feel when their identities are threatened.
Given this reality, we’ll almost certainly need some kind of devastating climate shock to get effective climate policy. That’s the key lesson of the recent financial crisis: when powerful special interests have convinced much of the public that what they’re doing isn’t dangerous, only a disaster that discredits those interests will provide an opportunity for comprehensive policy change like the Dodd-Frank financial regulations.
It is possible that the changes I’m seeing from the ship deck are the beginning of the climate shock that will awaken us to the danger we face. Scientists aren’t sure what will happen when a significant portion of the Arctic Ocean changes from white, sunlight-reflecting ice to dark, sunlight-absorbing open water. But most aren’t sanguine.
These experts are especially concerned that new patterns of air movement in the Arctic could disrupt the Northern Hemisphere’s jet streams, which are apparently weakening and moving northward. This could alter storm tracks, rainfall patterns, and food production far to the south.
The limited slack in the world’s food system, particularly its grain production, can amplify the effects of disruptions. Remember that two years ago, when higher oil prices encouraged farmers to shift enormous tracts of cropland from grain to biofuel production, grain prices quickly doubled or tripled. Violence erupted in dozens of countries. Should climate change cause crop failures in major food-producing regions of Europe, North America, and East Asia, the consequences would likely be far more severe.
Policy makers need to accept that societies won’t make drastic changes to address climate change until such a crisis hits. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for them to do in the meantime. When a crisis does occur, the societies with response plans on the shelf will be far better off than those that are blindsided. The task for national and regional leaders, then, is to develop a set of contingency plans for possible climate shocks— what we might call, collectively, Plan Z.
Some work of this kind is under way at intelligence agencies and research institutions in the United States and Europe. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has produced one of the best studies, Responding to Threat of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes. But for the most part these initiatives are preliminary and uncoordinated. We need a much more deliberate Plan Z, with detailed scenarios of plausible climate shocks; close analyses of options for emergency response by governments, corporations and nongovernmental groups; and clear specifics about what resources— financial, technological, and organizational— we will need to cope with different types of crises.
In the most likely scenarios, climate change would cause some kind of regional or continental disruption, like a major crop failure; this disruption would cascade through the world’s tightly connected economic and political systems to produce a global effect. Severe floods dislocating millions of people in a key poor country — as we’re seeing right now in Pakistan — could allow radicals to seize power and tip a geopolitically vital region into war. Or drought could cause an economically critical region like the North China plain to exhaust its water reserves, forcing people to leave en masse and precipitating a crisis that reverberates through the world economy.
A climate shock in North America is easy to imagine. Say a prolonged drought causes major cities in the American Southeast or Southwest to run out of water; both regions have large urban populations pushing against upper limits of water supply. The newsclips of cars streaming out of Atlanta or Phoenix might finally push our leaders to do something serious about climate change.
If so, a Plan Z for this particular scenario would help us make the most of the opportunity. It would provide guidelines for regional and local leaders on how to respond to the crisis. We would decide in advance where supplies of water would be found and who would get priority allocations; local law enforcement and emergency responders would already have worked out lines of authority with federal agencies and the military.
Then there are the broader steps to mitigate climate change in general. Here, Plan Z would address many critical questions: How fast could carbon emissions from automobiles and energy production be ramped down, and what would be the economic, political and social consequences of different rates of reduction? Where would we find the vast amounts of money needed to overhaul existing energy systems? How quickly could different economic sectors and social groups adapt to different kinds of climate impacts? And if geoengineering to alter earth’s climate — for example, injecting sulfates into the high atmosphere — is to be an option, who would make the decision and undertake the operation?
Looking over the endless, empty horizon of the Arctic, I find it hard to imagine this spot being of any importance to global affairs. But it is just one of many places now considered marginal that could be the starting point for a climate shock that plays a central role in the evolution of human civilization. We need to be ready.
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