If the entire state of New York were flooded, then about as many people would be displaced as the current flooding in South Asia. In India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, about 20 million have been uprooted from their homes, and the death toll is now approaching 200.
At first, this looked looked like a severe weather event not too out-of-the-ordinary for the monsoon season. After all, a third of Bangladesh is usually under water at this time every year (CIA World Factbook). But as the rainy day streak has now stretched to 20, the descriptions have turned dire:
"some of the worst floods for years"
"In some areas, the floods are being called the worst in living memory." [BBC, first link]
They might as well get used to them, because, unless things change, the world won't be able to reach the emissions targets necessary to render unlikely the increases in flooding climate change models suggest for the low-lying areas of South Asia.
Those who know anything about the likely impacts of climate change have a general idea that Bangladesh will be (and probably is now) one of its first victims. In a January diary, A Look Down the Barrel of the Global Warming Gun, I provided a little more detail as to why this is so.
If the climate model results reported in the New Scientist in 2003 come even close to being true, the land will be pushed over the edge:
Flooding in the country is set to increase by up to 40 per cent this century as global temperatures rise, the latest climate models suggest.
[snip]
...heavier rainfall triggered by global warming will swamp Bangladesh's riverbanks, a previously unforeseen effect, flooding between 20 and 40 per cent more land than today, says Monirul Qader Mirza, a Bangladeshi water resources expert now at the Adaptation and Impacts Research Group at the University of Toronto.
...People can grow crops on land regularly fertilised by nutrient-laden silt from the rivers...But extreme floods cause considerable hardship and loss of life: in 1988 and 1998 over two-thirds of the country was under water at some point.
Granted, the 40 percent figure is the worst case scenario, but even
[i]f temperatures rose by just 2 °C, two of the models showed that the mean flow of the Meghna and Brahmaputra rivers would increase by 20 per cent. (New Scientist Article)
What will it take to give ourselves a good chance of (but not ensure) avoiding a 2 °C raise and increase the likelihood of sparing Bangladeshis great hardship? According to this seminal article by George Monbiot (related to his new book), it will take a 60% global reduction of greenhouse gases, a 90% average cut by rich countries, and a 94% cut by the U.S by 2030. If this reasoning is even close to the mark, things look really bad for Bangladesh.
The IPCC's latest report echoes these findings. The following are excerpts from the Asia (PDF) section of the Working Group II contribution on "Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" of the Fourth Assessment Report (bold emphasis mine).
Climate change impacts.
An enhanced hydrological cycle and an increase in area averaged annual mean rainfall over Asia were projected. [10.1.1]
Increased rainfall intensity, particularly during the summer monsoon, could increase floodprone areas in temperate and tropical Asia. [10.1.1]
Annual mean rainfall exhibits increasing trends in Western China, Changjiang Valley and the South-Eastern coast of China, Arabian Peninsula, Bangladesh and along the western coasts of the Philippines. [10.2.2]
In other parts of Asia there will be less rainy days and more droughts, but in Bangladesh and India, the current floods are evidence of the IPCC's predictions, as well as current trends.
[Adapted from Table 10.2, "Summary of key observed past and present climate trends and variability", Ibid]
Region: South Asia
Country: India
...
Change in precipitation: Increase in extreme rains in north-west during summer monsoon in recent decades, lower number of rainy days along east coast
Region: South Asia
Country: Bangladesh
...
Change in precipitation: Decadal rain anomalies above long term averages since 1960s
Keep in mind that the east coast of India is not one of the affected areas. They are Assam (in the far northeast), Uttar Pradesh (in the north central and northwest), and Maharashtra (in the west, including Mumbai).
The result is hardship. Residents of low-lying areas are incredibly resilient to flooding, but when things get this inundated, no one can stay put.
Almost 200 people have died in the floods in the last few days.
In Bangladesh thousands of families are on the move in search of higher ground.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the affected area are at risk from hunger and disease.
...food, clean drinking water and medical aid are the priorities, but just a fraction of those who need them are receiving supplies as aid agencies and government teams struggle to get through.
Hardship. That is the primary (anthropogenic) motivation for environmentalism, the primary reason to reduce our emissions. No matter what we do, a large number of people will survive. We could go on burning fossil fuels until all the economically extractable resources have been used up, increase the GHG concentration in the atmosphere to well over 550 parts per billion, and increase the average global temperature to well over 2 degrees celsius from pre-industrial levels, and still not everyone or every species will become extinct. But there would be a massive amount of hardship.
Assuming that we as a global society care about avoiding hardship and pursuing happiness, then one would think that we would be preparing for and trying to minimize future negative changes before they spring upon us. This is the fundamental human ethical connection to fighting climate change and drastically cutting our emissions. It applies not only to ourselves and our neighbors, but people halfway around the world. I personally need that ethical grounding to give strength to my environmental beliefs. We're not just fighting climate change for the hell of it; we're doing so to, other things equal, preserve a certain level of global quality of life. So the question remains: do we want an easier transition or a harder one? The answer lies in how proactive we want to be about global warming.
If George Monbiot is correct (and I strongly recommend Heat; I'm reading it right now and it is a well-researched, honest, interesting, thorough, and tremendous book), then even the most progressive political solutions getting any attention (i.e. the Sanders-Boxer bill) will fall short of the ideal emissions cuts. For all the exciting involvement in the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement (645 cities), as well as ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (over 800 local governments) and the Clinton Climate Initiative (40 large cities), still, in the US the only city coming close to keeping its emissions level, much less reducing them, is Portland, Oregon (source).
So we have a long way to go, but the ingenuity is already within us. We just need to keep motivating ourselves that this is a cause worth fighting. Perhaps if we just imagined if our own state was flooded (or desiccated, or denuded of certain tree species, or whatever the predicted effects are for each of our areas), then we'd always be able to find that motivation.