Cyclone Mahasen – Poor Bangladesh Just Can’t Catch a Break

Bangladesh is evacuating one million people with Cyclone Mahasen expected to hit its low-lying delta coast on Thursday evening, said the United Nations, which estimated 4.1 million people were at risk due to gale-force winds, heavy rain and flooding.

via Bangladesh Orders 1 Million Evacuated as Cyclone Nears – NYTimes.com.

Parts of Myanmar are also under threat,  from flooding and possible  mudslides in more mountainous areas.

How does such a poor country evacuate that many people?  Where will they go?  How will they be fed?  What will happen to the livestock they had to leave behind, which provide part of their livelihood?  How will they be able to begin again?  or Will they end up moving into the slums of Dhaka, providing more fodder for the factories?

Interesting Indian Demographics

India’s TFR is only 2.5—and falling steadily. This figure barely exceeds that of the United States. In 2011, the US fertility rate was estimated at 2.1, essentially the replacement level; a more recent study now pegs it at 1.93. Still, from a global perspective, India and the US fall in the same general fertility category, as can be seen in the map posted here.

via India’s Plummeting Birthrate: A Television-Induced Transformation? | GeoCurrents.

The author relates the drastic (and relatively recent) decline to the advent of television, and in particular to soap operas.

Television depresses fertility because many of its offerings provide a model of middle-class families successfully grappling with the transition from tradition to modernity, helped by the fact that they have few children to support.

400 ppm – Pliocene Levels of CO2

An instrument near the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii has recorded a long-awaited climate milestone: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere there has exceeded 400 parts per million ppm for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.

via Climate Milestone: Earth’s CO2 Level Nears 400 ppm.

Its been at least 800,000 years since it was this high. This has serious, and scary, implications for the people, plants, and animals on earth.  We are already seeing shifting agricultural zones, pests, and flora.

How will changing climate zones impact food production, and the pests that go with them?  Will we be able to produce enough food?  Will the changing climate be drier where we need it to be wetter?  Will we be creative enough to cope with 9 billion people dependent on a steady food supply?

If anything, those numbers understate how different the Pliocene climate was. The tropical sea surface was about as warm as it is now, says Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, but the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles—which drives the jet streams in the mid-latitudes—was much smaller. The east-west gradient across the Pacific Ocean—which drives the El Niño-La Niña oscillation—was almost nonexistent. In effect, the ocean was locked in a permanent El Niño. Global weather patterns would have been completely different in the Pliocene.

What was it like when camels roamed Ellsmere Island?

Beavers and camels on Ellesmere Island, instead of glaciers, might not be so bad.  But there was a lot less ice in general in the Pliocene. That means there was a lot more water in the ocean, which means sea level was a lot higher—how high exactly, no one knows.

“The estimates have been all over the map,” Raymo says. They’ve ranged from 10 meters (33 feet) to 40 meters (131 feet) higher than today. But even the conservative estimate, were it to recur today, would mean flooding land inhabited by a quarter of the U.S. population.

Where will these people go?  And more importantly, who will pay for it?  And that’s just the US.  Rising seas will impact cities all over the world.  What sort of global trade will take place if the ports are flooded?

What questions do you have about climate change?

Mekong River – Quick, Look Before it’s Gone

In pictures: Damming Laos’ Mekong River – In Pictures – Al Jazeera English.

A total of 11 large hydropower dams are planned by the governments of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, while China has already completed five dams on the Mekong’s upper reaches, with another three under construction. China is also the driving force behind a cascade of dams on the Nam Ou River, a tributary of the Mekong in northern Laos.

Environmentalists fear these dams’ impact on fish numbers may have a devastating effect on food security and biodiversity in the region.

These countries are under intense pressure to industrialize and provide jobs for the people flooding into their cities.  Since factories require electricity, these dams are part of the vicious cycle – more displaced people needing more jobs.

The river also supplies the livelihood of millions of people.  How will damming it affect them?  The people most directly affected by this had no voice in the decision – how just is that?  What will become of the species that coexist with the river?  How will the changes affect the ecosystem of Indochina?  What would happen if these governments decided not to build the dams?

Human Trafficking

BBC News – Nepal: ‘I was

14 when I was sold’.

The real story, focusing on Nepalese women and children.

 

Restive Region of Russia

The Boston Marathon bombings and Chechnya’s long history of terrorism – The Week.

Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus where insurgents have been fighting for an independent state ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1994, a full-scale insurgency broke out, leading to two years of heavy conflict in which tens of thousands of Chechens and several thousand Russian soldiers died.

A memorial to the victims killed in the Beslan school tragedy, 2004.

Wikimedia Commons/aaron bird

Although it seems to two brothers alleged to be the Boston marathon bombers left the region years ago, they apparently maintained an interest in the area.

Then this, from the younger brother

From Stratfor:

Borderlines

 

A ‘Whom Do You Hang With?’ Map of America : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.

Ever since the borders of our 50 states were drawn so many years ago cultural geographers  have been trying to figure out if they reflect who we are, or if they are just arbitrary lines on a map.  Well, here are some answers.

[these] hunk[s] of America, in his view, is now an “effective community,” a place where people-to-people business has a distinct flavor, distinct from neighboring regions. In other words, it’s its own neighborhood.

California’s “neighborhood” includes Arizona and much of Nevada.

The above map is based on WheresGeorge.com data.  This website, where you can enter the serial number of the bills in your wallet, and then watch as they travel around the country, shows several distinct “neighborhoods.”

In the Seattle area, for example, his team found that over two weeks, only 7.8 percent of the bills moved more than 500 miles away. Most of the money stayed close. More interestingly, Dirk’s team began to notice virtual borders, lines that the money rarely crossed. In this map, you can see the territory marked by the Canadian border to the north, a bit of California at the southern end, and Idaho to the east. Oregon and Washington seem undifferentiated. But at the edges, a blue border seems to capture and contain most of the cash (and the people?) moving within. Those lines, Dirk marked deep blue.

Another map, by some folks at MIT, uses anonymous AT&T data.

This map shows different, but equally ‘unstate-like’ borders.

Will we remain the 50 states forever?  Or will our borders change to reflect the changing demographics of this country?

Crazy or Not, Here He Comes

Inside the world of Kim Jong Un: North Korea’s strange hermit king – The Week.

Nice analysis from the folks at The Week.

What kind of student was he really?
Kim flunked science and only narrowly passed English, German, and math….He idolized American basketball players like Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan, and often shot hoops with Swiss friends.

Is his authority secure?

Obviously not.

The Kims’ sibling rivalry
The late Kim Jong Il’s oldest son, Kim Jong Nam, is still bitter over his little brother’s success. Jong Nam has repeatedly lobbed insults at Jong Un since his accession, telling one Japanese newspaper that his regime was “a joke” and doomed to collapse.

The older brother is now in hiding (or dead).

Fairy Circles in the Namib

BBC News – Termites ‘engineer fairy circles’.

At 2 to 10m across, these previously unexplained formations were attributed to ‘fairies.’  Now we know the truth – they are created by termites to conserve water in the desert.

[the] invertebrates (Psammotermes allocerus) first clear a patch of ground by eating the roots of short-lived, annual grasses.

This bare, sandy earth then becomes an effective rain trap – with no vegetation, water cannot be lost through transpiration (the evaporation of water from plants).

Instead, it collects, oasis-like, just below the surface where it can sustain the termites and a supply of perennial grasses at the margins of the circles. These are available to eat even in the driest seasons.

Of course this permits and encourages even wider benefits  – lizards, geckos, moles, and other animals up the food chain rely on the termites.

…their occurrence hugs the isohyet of 100mm mean annual precipitation.

“It’s very pronounced; they’re really adapted to that amount of annual precipitation,” he told BBC News. “If the climate changed [to wetter conditions], this belt of occurrence would shift to a more arid part of the desert. If the climate got drier in general, they would shift towards the east, inland.”

These engineers allow the desert to increase productivity, much like the beavers in mountain environs.

The Hamburg scientist argues that the termites’ behaviour surpasses the accomplishments of that other great ecosystem engineer – the beaver.

“We all admire the beaver for the way it can turn a linear river into a lake with a dam, but the termites turning the desert into a pattern of oases that allow permanent life even in drought periods for hundreds of years – that’s much more fascinating,” he told BBC News.

How will climate change affect these animals and the ecosystem that relies on them?

 

Monarch Butterflies Struggle

Geography in the News: Monarch Butterflies Struggle – News Watch.

Near the end of February each year, scientists studying monarch butterflies at their overwintering sites in Central Mexico witness signs that the butterfly colonies were “breaking up.” This separation of tens of thousands of butterflies clustered together on single trees indicate that the populations are preparing for their lengthy spring migration from Mexico to the United States and Southern Canada. This year’s colony numbers were depressed by 59 percent and scientists are worried.

Monarchs have migrated to Mexico for thousands of years, one generation going south, and different generations heading north.  No one knows how they do it.  But we may not have the chance to study these mass migrations much longer, as the species are currently declining at an alarming rate.

One particularly disturbing conclusion is the effect of the decline in milkweed along the migration paths owing to the use of herbicides and perhaps some genetically engineered corn in U.S. agriculture. Milkweed is particularly susceptible to pre-emergent and defoliant herbicides.

Since all Monarch caterpillars live on milkweed, a decline in that species would be devastating.

How will we protect the butterflies?  What will happen if we don’t?