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Monday, June 23, 2008

[ALOCHONA] Bangladesh could disappear entirely by end of century: NASA

Melting polar ice caps could cause sea levels to rise by up to 25 metres, causing Bangladesh to disappear entirely under water by the turn of the century, according to predictions of climate change by the US government's NASA space agency.

   One of the UK's prominent newspapers, the Independent, reported on Friday that the globally accepted models predicting gradual climate change could be underestimated according to Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Titled 'Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century,' the report attributes the grim prediction to Professor Jim Hansen, the director of the institute, 'whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else's', the report claims.

   The widely accepted prediction for Bangladesh issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the globally authoritative scientific body on climate change, suggests that Bangladesh could lose 17 per cent of its land mass and 30 per cent of its food production by the year 2050.

   The IPCC was a joint winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize for its immense contribution to the world's understanding of the science of climate change.But the IPCC's predictions have recently been questioned by research which suggests that the pace of climate change is much more rapid than originally believed.

   'The 25-metre rise prediction is not one I have heard yet, but scientists are certainly revising their earlier predictions to accommodate a 6-8 metre rise in sea levels this century,' Mozaharul Alam, a research fellow at the Dhaka-based environment think-tank BCAS, told New Age on Sunday.

   According to Mozaharul, the original prediction by the IPCC dates from research completed in 2005, and does not completely take into account the additional warming of the earth's atmosphere caused by the melting of light-reflecting ice sheets, commonly known as the 'ice-albido effect'.

   A new study by Australian and US scientists revealed this month that the upper 700 metres of the world's oceans warmed at a rate 50 per cent faster in the last four decades of the 20th century than was reported in IPCC's 2007 report.

   Bangladesh is expected to be among the countries worst affected by rising global temperatures as a result of human-induced climate change, along with a handful of small island states.Scientists also predict that Bangladesh will experience rising frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and tropical cyclones. Meanwhile, rising sea levels as a result of melting polar ice caps could submerge large swathes of the country's coastal belt and southern region.

   The latest prediction of a doomsday scenario for Bangladesh ties in with a 2003 US Department of Defence report which suggested that by 2020 'persistent typhoons and a higher sea level [will] create storm surges [and] cause significant coastal erosion, making much of Bangladesh nearly uninhabitable'.The report carries a disclaimer, however, that scientists consulted had cautioned that the report's predictions were 'too extreme'.

   The US defence department's report predicts border skirmishes and conflicts resulting from millions of displaced people in Bangladesh, India and China.The excessive use of fossil fuels by the industrialised nations is principally responsible for a build-up of 'greenhouse gases' in the earth's atmosphere which are trapping heat from the sun and causing global temperatures to rise.

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