World View of Global Warming

Warming Winds, Rising Tides, Bangladesh

Asia's largest rivers, the Ganges and the Bramaputra, join in the world's most extensive delta and flow into the Bay of Bengal. There lies Bangladesh, a nation of 140 million people beset by poverty and the floods of the rivers, and now also affected by rising sea level. Gary Braasch visited to document this threat, traveling by boat south from Dhaka and speaking to villagers, fishermen, and scientists. Already a million people a year are displaced by loss of land along rivers, and indications are this is increasing. Villagers spoke of losing a town mosque to unexpectedly fast erosion, even in a time of good weather in the dryer season. The one meter sea level rise generally predicted if no action is taken about global warming will inundate more than 15 percent of Bangladesh, displacing more than 13 million people and cut into the crucial rice crop. Intruding water will damage the Sundarbans mangrove forest, a world heritage site. Read the report here.

Warming Winds, Rising Tides: Tuvalu

The 11,000 Tuvaluans live on nine coral atolls totaling 10 square miles scattered over 500,000 square miles of ocean south of the equator and west of the International Dateline.  Tuvalu is the smallest of all nations, except for the Vatican.  Tuvalu has no industry, burns little petroleum, and creates less carbon pollution than a small town in America.  This tiny place nevertheless is on the front line of climate change.  The increasing intensity of tropical weather, the increase in ocean temperatures, and rising sea level  -- all documented results of a warming atmosphere -- are making trouble for Tuvalu.

Tuvaluans face the possibility of being among the first climate refugees, although they never use that term.   Former assistant Environmental minister and now assistant secretary for Foreign Affairs Paani Laupepa said he felt threatened.  "Our whole culture will have to be transplanted."

Sea level rise is the greatest problem.  Tuvalu's highest elevation is 4.6 meters -- 15 feet --  but most of it is no more than a meter above the sea.  Several times each year the regular lunar cycle of tides, riding on the ever higher mean sea level, brings the Pacific sloshing over onto roads and into neighborhoods.  In the center of the larger islands the sea floods out of old barrow pits and even squirts up out of the coral bedrock.  Puddles bubble up that eventually cover part of the airport on the main island of Funafuti and inundate homes that are not along the ocean.

This February, the tides were driven against the shore by unusual westerly winds, and there was increasing erosion. The main asphalt road is only about 10 km long, yet it runs right along the lagoon in many places and was covered in water and coral rocks thrown up by the tide.  Hundreds of wood frame and corrugated metal roofed homes and several churches, built right on the lagoon, were drenched by the wind waves riding on the higher tides.

The islands are not going to go under immediately.  Yet the effects accumulate, year by year.  "Even if we are not completely flooded, " said Laupepa, "in 50 to 70 years we face increasingly strong storms and cyclones,  changing weather patterns, damage to our coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures, and flooding of all our gardens."  Not growing enough food and decreasing fish catch if reefs are damaged would mean "importing more food, more foreign exchange, and more health and diet problems, " he said.

Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Delaware Bay

High tide on Delaware Bay presses migrating shorebirds against storm sewer outfalls near Cape May. The sandpipers, red knots, and turnstones that migrate to the Arctic in numbers approaching one million, already face declines in horseshoe crab eggs, their principal food along these shores. Rising sea level now is reducing the area for foraging, and could affect the success of this annual flight thousands of miles from South America to the Arctic.

Even more drastic changes are occurring in Chesapeake Bay to the south, where sea level rise is more than twice the world average -- and predicted to rise about 8 inches in just 25 years. Crucial islands like Poplar and Smith, and wetlands like the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, are succumbing to the encroaching waters.

Warming Winds, Rising Tides: Florida and the Atlantic Coast

The entire coast of Florida is threatened by rising seas and stronger surges during storms. This sandy shore north of Miami at Dania Beach is being washed away by a normal high tide. On a clear day in April 2001.

This casts doubt on the future of the apartments and homes that crowd the East Coast. Rising sea level is also driving sea water into the Everglades, inundating mangroves, and threatening all low lying islands. Thus Florida and the Keys are the U.S. equivalent of the many island nations of the Indo-Pacific who face rising seas.

To the north on Cape Hatteras, the US Park Service saw the futility of protecting America's most famous lighthouse from  the eroding shoreline.  In 1999 it moved Hatteras Light back 2800 feet from the surf.

Erosion along Cape Hatteras North Carolina has been about 12 feet per year in recent years, leaving house after house stranded in the surf, awaiting its destruction. This is due to a combination of rising sea level and stronger storms and hurricanes, effects of increasing warmth in the atmosphere and ocean. Federal insurance guarantees money for rebuilding, and local officials continue to bulldoze sand back onto beaches -- both of which actions actually increase erosion damage, according to scientists.

Tourists wading across the Plaza San Marco -- a common event in Venice, the European symbol of both rising seas and the difficulty of preventing damage to irreplaceable coastal cities. Venice has been sinking for hundreds of years, perched as it is on unstable sediments of the Lagoon. But the rising Adriatic Sea is rapidly exacerbating the problem. At the current rate the sea will rise a foot in this century. Italian officials made the decision to construct elaborate tide dams at Lagoon entrances. Environmental groups and some scientists warn that higher tide and storm levels will soon overcome these defenses, while the dams may isolate the Lagoon from the natural flushing it needs to remain a viable ecosystem.

"Sez who?":  References 7

Each of the foregoing photos reports on documented science, peer-reviewed published studies and scientific literature surveys. Those references are listed later in this Web site, along with climate change data, World View of Global Warming project advisors, and links to some sources of climate information.

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