Global Warming Hits Bangladesh

The impoverished nation of Bangladesh offers us a case study of the effects and prospects in store for us as a result of global warming. This agricultural nation, sandwiched between India and Burma (Myanmar) on the Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal, is seriously threatened by the more powerful storms caused by warming oceans and by the rising sea level produced by the melting of polar ice, especially in Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Bangladesh has the seventh largest population in the world, 150 million people, all crammed into a country the size of the state of Iowa. The U.N. expects that population to grow 25% to 200 million by 2015. The people are 90% Muslim and 10% Hindu. The Muslims have generally followed a benign mystical form of Islam in the Sufi tradition, infused with many local Hindu elements. But as population, environmental and consequently economic pressures have risen, the more austere Wahabbi Islam of Saudi Arabia has found a growing popularity. Demand for burkas is going up.

Geographically, the nation is a delta region formed by three great rivers, the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna, and a hundred smaller ones that form a maze of channels and bayous at an elevation of a scant 2 to 6 feet above sea level. Rice paddies produce the staple crop. The average income is $520 per year, primarily from rice farming.

From May to November come the torrential rainstorms of the seasonal monsoons. In normal years at least 1/3 of the country floods, in some years as much as 2/3. Thousand die annually in the rising waters. Vast mangrove forests, the largest in the world, cover 2300 square miles and protect the coast from storm surges. But this ecosystem is under serious threat.

The sea level is rising by about 3 millimeters a year as a result of global warming. Under the best case estimates, the ocean will rise only about 12 inches in the next few decades. A moderate estimate is 30 inches. A worst case could be as high as 38 inches. If the best case materializes "only" 12-15% of Bangladesh's land area will disappear under the waves and 9 million environmental refugees will be created.

The ocean's rise is already manifesting itself in seawater encroachment. It is getting increasingly hard to find drinkable water along the coast. Saline incursions at high tide are damaging the productivity of the rice paddies to the point where yields per acre have fallen to one-half of those harvested in China. Desperate rice farmers, unable to make a living from their paddies, are destroying the mangrove forests and replacing them with shrimp farms. In a vicious circle, as the mangrove barrier is degraded the salt inflow from the Bay of Bengal increases and more salinity proceeds inland at high tide, ruining more farmland.

As America found out from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, once the delta bayou vegetation is stripped from a coastal area, it is far more vulnerable to the storm surges that accompany cyclonic storms. And these storms increasingly pack larger punches gained from the energy of the warmer ocean waters that spawn and sustain them. Cyclone Sidr, a typhoon that struck in 2007, featured 135 mile-an-hour winds and killed 4,000 Bangladeshis.

As the effects of sea level rise and more extreme weather increase, millions of desperate people lose the ability to provide for themselves from the land and seek their fortunes elsewhere. The capital of Dacca has become an ungovernable, teeming slum of an estimated 12 million people. So many emaciated refugees flee the country that neighboring India is in the process of building and manning a 2500-mile border fence to keep Bangladeshis out. Another two million virtual debt slaves have paid an average $2,000 fee to labor contractors to ship them to wealthy Persian Gulf states, where they perform the hard manual labor that maintains the Saudi and Emerati upper class in luxury.

In a final irony, with Bangladesh increasingly unable to fund an infrastructure, educational opportunities are more and more being provided by Saudi wealth in the form of madrassas, religious schools that focus almost completely on memorizing the Koran and interpreting it according to the tenets of the radical fundamentalist Wahabbi sect. A 2007 video produced by Osama bin Laden and distributed in the region mentions as one of its "findings" the idea that the West is intentionally fomenting global warming as a means of obliterating the people of Bangladesh-who should therefore ally themselves with him in order to strike back.