Unexpected side-effects of floods

All of the spiders climb into trees (see #8).

Perfectly logical and yet utterly unanticipated; I feel like there is an allegory and/or warning related to systemic financial risk in there somewhere.

Update: It happens in Australia too:

Pakistan floods and world weather patterns

Via MR, striking pictures of the flooding in Pakistan, which may have affected more than 20 million people and was apparently caused by the same weather patterns responsible for this summer's heat wave in Russia (and the next global food crisis?).

Remember that the Punjab is also a major wheat breadbasket, although it does not appear to be among the majorly affected regions.

Is it climate change's fault? Hard to say, honestly, since pinning any single weather pattern on climate change is impossible, although as the Economist article cited above says, it fits the pattern of increased extreme events we would expect with global warming.

Update: Apparently one fifth(!) of the country is underwater. You could infer this from the above picture but it hadn't occurred to me that it could be interpreted so directly.

Sea rise not that scary?

That's the case that climate adaptationist Bjorn Lomborg (don't call him a skeptic) makes at Project Syndicate, because we've dealt with it already:

Imagine that over the next 70 or 80 years, a giant port city – say, Tokyo – found itself engulfed by sea levels rising as much as 15 feet or more... Without a vast, highly coordinated global effort, how could we possibly cope with sea-level rises on that order of magnitude?

Well, we already have. In fact, we’re doing it right now. Since 1930, excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused Tokyo to subside by as much as 15 feet, with some of the lowest parts of the downtown area dropping almost a foot per year in some years. Similar subsidence has occurred over the past century in a wide range of cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Osaka, Bangkok, and Jakarta. In each case, the city has managed to protect itself from such large sea-level rises and thrive.

Lomborg cites research research claiming that over 95% of the world's coastal population is urban, making rising oceans no big deal.

A 20-foot rise in sea levels (which, not incidentally, is about ten times more than the United Nations climate panel’s worst-case expectations) would inundate about 16,000 square miles of coastline, where more than 400 million people currently live... [and] the vast majority of those 400 million people reside within cities, where they could be protected relatively easily, as in Tokyo.

Off the top of my head, I'd challenge this with Bangladesh, which has 160 million people and is very low-lying:

Is it really fair to assume Dhaka has an easy out just because it's "urban"? Maybe Jakarta has coped with rising seas, but Indonesia's per capita GDP is still 3x that of Bangladesh.

Lagos and Karachi are two other poor coastal megacities that would be worth doing the same analysis for.

Update: I just had dinner with someone from Bangladesh who confirmed that the idea that rising seas won't hit Bangladesh hard is preposterous. First, there are millions of people living in low-lying, non-urban areas (especially hundreds of islands in the Ganges Delta). Second, much of the productive agricultural land is similarly low and is already suffering from soaring salinity in many areas. So it seems that the underlying analysis is weak, and Lomborg himself should be doing better quality control of the sources he chooses to cite.

Update 2: A few relevant numbers to refine our back-of-the-envelope: 46% of Bangladeshis live within 10 meters of the average sea level, and the country is only 27% urban. So it seems very unlikely that Lomborg's math that "only ~15 million people would need to be relocated [over the course of the century]" can possibly be right.

“Solutions” for wildlife conservation, cont.

To pirates, add military standoffs in disputed territory:

It seems the very adorable Asiatic black bears of Kashmir are one group that is pleased by all the conflict there. Authorities estimate that their population has gone from 800 in 1990 to 3,000 now. They (and other endangered species in the area, presumably) are benefiting it seems from lingering fear of violence, which stops poachers and hunters, as well as the dearth of hunting rifles after the Indian authorities confiscated them as an attempt to quell the separatist revolt that started twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this particular “solution” generalizes (not to mention the terrible human costs):

It looks like conflict itself is terrible for wildlife, and happens disproportionately in biodiversity hotspots. One study found that 80 percent of the armed conflicts between 1950-2000 took place in these areas important to maintaining plant and animal diversity. Detrimental effects on population and habitat, such as those suffered by the DRC's gorilla population are well known.

The bright side, looking at the Kashmir bear evidence and the Korean DMZ, seems to be that when conflict pauses, the animals benefit as well as the humans.

Militants blow up girl’s school in Pakistan

Sad news, particularly for anyone who has read Three Cups of Tea.

"The Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling"

A reader passes along this unfortunate news:

Poor crop yields, water shortages and more extreme temperatures are pushing rural villagers closer to the brink as climate change grips Nepal. Farmers say changing weather patterns have dramatically affected crop production, leaving them unable to properly feed themselves and getting into debt.

More than 3.4 million people in Nepal are estimated to require food assistance, due to a combination of natural disasters, including 2008/09’s winter drought – one of the worst in the country’s history.

Nepal is seeing an increase in temperature extremes, more intense rainfall and increased unpredictability in weather patterns, including drier winters and delays in the summer monsoons. The changes, partly due to the impact of melting Himalayan glaciers, could also be felt well beyond Nepal’s borders.

It's always hard to draw a conclusive line between the effects of climate change and natural year-to-year variations - it always irritates me when people count Hurricane Katrina as a direct result of climate change, for example (not true). But this is nevertheless an ugly preview of what a warmer world could look like (not to mention falling crop yields in major breadbaskets, etc.).

Shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas would have repercussions well beyond Nepal - they are the source of the major rivers bringing water to the two most populous countries in the world, and international tensions are already rising.