|
2009-03-23, 21:27 "Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century" read the headline in the Independent, a U.K. newspaper.
 | | Life in Noakhali, on Bangladesh's coast |
Really? I visited Bangladesh a couple of times recently and thought about this article. It's eerie to travel for hours along bumpy roads, past dense rice fields that support millions of people, and think that this could all be gone in my lifetime.
Fortunately for them, the situation isn't so dire. Don't get me wrong; I'm no climate change denier. It's just that the author of the article above, Johann Hari, seems to have made a basic mistake.
He claims that James Hansen, the famed NASA climate scientist, "believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels this century."
Never mind that Hansen doesn't own any satellites, and is a climate modeler. His specialty is not analyzing satellite data. But also think about it—25 meters. For those of you not familiar with the metric system, or who are numerically challenged, 25 meters is huge. I live in an apartment building near the ocean, on the twelfth floor. If the seas climbed that high, they'd reach about the eighth floor of my building.
In contrast, the numbers that most researchers are talking about are one or two meters of sea-level rise by 2100. (The range comes partly because scientists don't fully understand how glaciers and ice sheets will melt and fracture with more warming, and partly because they don't know how much greenhouse gases people will emit.) |
|
Click to read more...
|
|
|
2009-01-19, 20:13 Last night Sarah and I went to see a production of Chicago, the musical, here in Karachi. It was good, but I can say we could never forget we were in Pakistan. It was in an outdoor tent, set up on the site of a bowling alley called Area 51, after the top secret base in the U.S. desert, where X-Files aficionados others of that ilk think alien spacecraft are stored. The bowling alley's sign even has a couple of almond-eyed aliens, holding bowling balls in their slender fingers with bulbous tips, like tree frogs' toes. At the start of the play, the emcee had a line laying out the storyline, saying something about "sex, murder, media—this is Chicago." The person next to me said, "Sounds like Pakistan." Then about halfway through the play, we heard a murmur of some music that didn't seem to quite fit in. I wasn't sure what was happening, until the musical's music stopped between scenes, and a sitar and drums emerged from the background. Next door there seemed to be a mehndi—one of the several nights of a typical Pakistani wedding.  | | A menhdi near my apartment recently (click on it to see larger version) |
Though the music was a little distracting for us, we felt bad for the people next to us, who were trying to have a wholesome wedding and had jazz and sex blasted over their party music. Although, at a friend's mehndi I went to a few months ago, the bride's friends did a Thriller re-creation (popular at weddings lately; just search for "thiller wedding" on YouTube), and the lead dancer did a vigorous crotch grab, which I thought might scandalize Pakistanis, but no one seemed to flinch. |
|
2009-01-08, 22:35
I wanted to go to the coast of Bangladesh so I could find out how people there live. These lands may not even be there, if they get swallowed by rising seas, swelled by global warming.
But when we went to the district of Noakhali and I asked some fishermen about climate change, they didn't have much to say. What they really wanted to talk about was pirates.
One fisherman had his own fishing boat, which some NGOs—non-governmental organizations—had retro-fitted with stronger planks, iron connectors, and so on to make it stronger. I was told that the seas have gotten more rough over the last few decades, and the fishermen needed stronger boats to be able to brave the waves.
 | | Stuck until high tide comes—but pirates are a problem too |
But this fisherman (standing on his boat, above) said he'd been fishing all his life, but hadn't noticed any change in the ocean. (Another fisherman—when we were talking to a bunch of them in a little tea shop made from bamboo poles, with sheets tacked onto them (see below)—told me "the sea is always rough," as if I was asking a stupid question.) |
|
Click to read more...
|
|
|
2009-01-02, 14:50 You might think it should go unsaid that bottled water (especially premium drinking water) would be "free from arsenic," since it's a toxic element that's responsible for what's been called "the world's worst mass poisoning." But in Bangladesh, this is a point worth advertising.  | Acme bottled water now "free from arsenic"
(click above for larger photo) |
(Arsenic is used to make pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, and drinking water laced with it can cause skin disease, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, numbness in the hands and feet and partial paralysis, and blindness, not to mention various kinds of cancer (bladder, lung, kidney, prostate, and more), the EPA says.) In one of the most notorious cases of unwanted consequences, Bangladeshis have suffered these problems from unknowingly drinking arsenic-laden water, drawn up from deep tube wells that aid agencies put in. These deep wells allowed people to avoid drinking water from rivers and ponds, or from shallow wells, which can be contaminated with bacteria causing cholera and other diarrheal disease.
Now many wells have been tested and marked if they have high levels of arsenic, and researchers are trying to understand where arsenic occurs in the ground, so that they can figure out where to drill tube wells while avoiding the poison. Meanwhile, others are working on low-cost ways of pulling arsenic out of the water—the most promising, perhaps, is a sand filter filled with bits of iron, which react with the arsenic and pull it out of the water. This invention won Bangaldeshi researcher Abul Hussum a million-dollar prize, and MIT researchers are trying to scale up his filter to meet the great need. I have no idea whether this Acme bottled water is actually free from arsenic. Who's checking their claims? But I hope that someone is able to get arsenic-free water to Bangladeshis at a price way below that of bottled water. |
|
|
