Global Warming Claims First Inhabited Island (Again)

Just in time for Christmas, the Indian island of Lohachara has been baptized into the climate change religion.

According to the environmental editor at the Independent (UK), which published the fast-breaking news today (12/24/06), Lohachara has disappeared beneath the waves--thanks to global warming, he presumes:

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports

Published: 24 December 2006

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. (read the rest here)

How Mr. Lean knows beyond the faintest doubt that the rising waters are "caused by global warming" he never explains. Nonetheless, the island is now submerged, and that's a real-life disaster.

Yet so is the journalism. The problem is, Calcutta's Telegraph published a story on Lohachara's submersion on October 30 of this year. Mr. Lean is at least some two-months late, which wouldn't be so bad if he came out with it up front and didn't represent it as breaking news. It also wouldn't be so bad if, as Kolkata Newsline reported (also on October 30), the deluge of Lohachara occurred 22 years ago.

But Lean's agenda is to build the hype for climate change, not report the news.

And unlike Mr. Lean's piece, neither the Telegraph's nor the Newsline's articles claim special knowledge about the cause of the island's submersion. Climate change comes up, as well it should, but so do other ideas. They don't take global warming as dogma. A good illustration is the concluding section of the Telegraph artilce, entitled "Underlying truth":

From the very beginning, the islands have been a subsiding delta. A 1962 record with the West Bengal government — the first working plan of the department of forests — says fragments of ‘ceriops’, a mangrove variety, were found below the sea level during excavation around George’s Dock in Calcutta. “But the recent changes in sea level seem more severe,” Hazra warns.

The more literate islanders are worried that no national policy safeguards the envirogees. “What do the new National Disaster Management Policy and the West Bengal government’s disaster management department have for people facing environmental disasters like these,” asks Jateswar Panda, among the few residents of the Sundarbans who went to college.

The country’s natural disaster management revolves around instant calamities like earthquakes, landslides, flash floods and, more recently, drought. “What about slow onset disasters like arsenic or vanishing islands,” he exclaims.

According to some estimates, at least one lakh people will have to be evacuated from the 12 threatened inner estuary islands of the Sundarbans in the next decade if the present rate of submergence continues. The scientists feel it would be wise to plan a gradual shift to safer places like the adjoining North and South 24-Parganas districts rather than wait for a demographic disaster to happen.

The West Bengal government says the JU study is insufficient to prove climate change. Says Atanu Raha, director of the Sunderban Biosphere Reserve, “Accretion and erosion are natural phenomena.

Things like a rise in temperature or an increase in sea level have to be studied over hundreds of years. A 30-year study is not enough to come to a conclusion that the climate is changing.”

Raha, who has studied satellite images of the last 20 years, says just as some islands have gone down in the sea, vast land areas like Thakuran char and New Island have emerged out of the sea because of silt deposits.

Read the whole Telegraph article here.

See Tim Blair's blog on this subject here.