Thursday, August 9, 2012

A death trap in the making

Global warming may not leave people with many options

This was the decade of global warming. While the Copenhagen summit 2009 has been deemed a failure, it has definitely given the issue a global platform, more so when seen in light of the recent criticism of global warming data – detractors have accused that results have been manipulated to support warming theorists.

Irrespective of that, the impact of global warming and climate change is gruesome. Sea level is rising by around 0.2 cm a year. Horrifyingly, a 1m rise would affect 6 million people in Egypt; with 12% to 15% of agricultural land lost, 13 million in Bangladesh with 16% of national rice production lost and 72 million in China and “tens of thousands” of hectares of agricultural land, according to Nicholls and Leatherman. From 1961 to 2003, the global ocean temperature rose by 0.10 °C. More severe implications include transnational migration of epidemics like malaria, plague et al. In addition, economic cost can be easily gauged from the example of the 1926 Miami hurricane, which cost $157 billion. What is more appalling is that around 25 million people are estimated to have been displaced in the 1990s due to environmental changes and shockingly, the number is estimated to reach 150 million by the end of 2050 as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More grievously, 150,000 are estimated to die every year due to climate change, as per data by the World Health Organization.

And while the implications of global warming are far more than we can gauge, over 70% of the world population is unaware of the issue.


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