In his early 1960s anthem, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, Bob Dylan sings about journeying through a gloomy world where his protagonist “stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, and was out in front of a dozen dead oceans”. He also waxes lyrical about lots and lots of really hard rain.
Sound familiar? It should. Add to this mixture drought, increasing temperature, sea-level rise and other related issues, and it’s almost like Dylan’s song predicted the impacts of climate change happening right now around the world.
The song is very depressing…
Scientists talk a lot about increasing temperatures causing polar melting and rising sea levels. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research claimed earlier this year that “Global sea level is rising, and faster than expected. We need to honestly discuss the risk rather than trying to play it down.” Along with other leading oceanographic scientists, Rahmstorf agrees that sea levels will rise by around 1 metre this century, and a further 3.5 metres by 2200.
“Sea-level rise doesn’t stop in 2100″, Rahmstorf warned the Copenhagen Science Summit in March this year. “We’re setting in motion new processes that will mean sea-level rise for centuries to come.”
As the sea rises and heats up, one particularly devastating spin-off effect is that typhoon-prone coastal regions will become more vulnerable to tropical storms, hurricanes, tidal surges, tsunamis and flooding.
Just over the last few years tropical storms like Hurricane Katrina, Andrew and Ike ripped through the Caribbean and southern US killing many and costing more than $100 billion damage. Cyclone Nargis lashed Burma last year, killing at least 146,000 people, and razing much of the land, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and without access to clean water or basic facilities.
In late May 2009, Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh and East India, killing more than 200 people and making 750,000 homeless. Before the storm, locals from the Satkhira, in southwest Bangladesh, told Oxfam reps about rising sea levels, higher tides, and increasing salification of their land. When the storm arrived, it wasn’t particularly strong, but it coincided with yet another unusually high tide, and the storm surge breached the embankments, destroying villages, crops, and lives.
The most talked about cause of sea-level rise is the melting of polar caps, but there’s also the thermal expansion of the water, which will only exacerbate the process. According to the Asian Development Bank, even conservative projections of a 40cm rise spell disaster, with the number of coastal dwellers globally at risk from flooding increasing from 13 million to 94 million.
A one metre rise would cause incomprehensible devastation.
Just last night the news showed footage of Typhoon Morakot and Tropical Storm Etau wreaking havoc in China, Japan, and Taiwan. In Taiwan the typhoon has caused the worst flooding in five decades, leading to death, displacement and injury. Across east Asia, millions have been evacuated from their homes, and according to China Central TV at least 38 have been confirmed dead in Taiwan alone, though the final total may be hundreds more.
Fifty-one year old Mindanaoan farmer Magdalena Mansilla knows about living with typhoons, flooding and tropical storms. But it hasn’t always been like this. Until recently southern Mindanao, located in the south of the Filipino archipelago, wasn’t a typhoon-prone region, but these days wild weather systems are becoming much more common.
Magdalena has lost her home in floods twice in four years. In 2008, Typhoon Frank swept through her town, Lambayong – in Mindanao’s south-west province of Sultan Kudarat – even though it’s not on the official ‘typhoon path’.
Some farmers say that slash-and-burn farming has undermined the river banks integrity, leading to erosion and flash-flooding. River sediment has washed into the surrounding farmland leaving it uncultivatable.
Others are convinced that climate shift also plays a key role. Julian Asion, South Cotabato province’s municipal environment officer, says that in his area in southern Mindanao “Rains come more frequently, even in months when we least expect it. There have been days when a two-hour downpour will bring the water equivalent of what was once a month’s average.”
In the last verse of his bleak ballad Dylan lamented, “then I’ll stand (by) the ocean until I start sinkin’” – a prophetic line preempting sea-level rise. If politicians and key decision-makers don’t start changing their policies now to reverse the surging tide of climate change ‘a hard rain’s certainly gonna fall’…and plenty of it.
Rahmstorf, S (2009) ‘We must shake off this inertia to keep sea level rises to minimum’ The Guardian, 3 March. www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/03/sea-levels-rising
Rahmstorf, S (2009), Presentation at Copenhagen Science Conference, March 2009.