Are the wheels coming off the global warming bandwagon?

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

I have little or no confidence in the IPCC since it is so politicized. Their estimates are instrumental rather than predictive but that doesn't seem to be the worst of it.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually. . .

"Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea," Sarker said.

"A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land." . .

"For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this," he said.

"Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries into the future."

Dams built along the country's southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology, Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said.

"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams have more than compensated this loss," Rahman said.

Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to prevent flooding.

"If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future," Rahman said.

Perhaps they can steal a page from the European low country book and aggressively make land, especially since they seem to have a steady supply of sediment.

New Orleans in the US needs to do some of this too. Mismanagement of Mississippi river sediment has caused loss of land as the delta sinks and erodes due to thoughtless misdirection of sediment. There are some issues on the east and west coasts of the US too - beach erosion and offshore islands sinking - due to disruption of river sediment flows.

Climate science seems to be an immature science and its practitioners seem too narrow. So many natural systems are involved that the models seem sparse and untrustworthy, and the predictions of net effects are just SWAGs. The worst bit, though, is that it is all so politicized that the "scientists" cease to be scientists. They are not truth tellers.

I read the other day that it is becoming fashionable to mock greens for their excesses, and that there is rising support for oil exploration and exploitation, even among those who started the whole anti-offshore drilling thing years ago. There seems to be increasing support for nuclear power too. People seem to be better informed about the true state of global emissions - their rapid increase in developing countries - and that the overwhelming majority of people in the world have no intention of stifling development.

The bottom line? The politics of energy reform -- whether to better align supply/demand, to address rising costs, to enhance security, or to address climate change -- are going to be impossible if based on an approach that requires higher-priced energy. By contrast, progress toward these goals will be far simpler if accompanied by cheaper energy. How long will it take for this lesson to sink in?

The tired old politics of limits is of no value to any but the tired old countries of Europe and minorities in some other developed countries. Developing countries don't mind if others hobble themselves, though it will have little net effect on global issues, but very sensibly have no desire to limit themselves.

How can we rid ourselves of this political disease?

Update: Theatre of The Absurd

Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is one contestant in a ‘climate war game’ taking place this week in Washington, where four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States are negotiating a new deal on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions. . .

"Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. ... Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon." “It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try,” says Tollefson.

If yesterday's roleplay scenario is anything to go by, it seems the EU and US may completely swap stances on climate policy by 2015!

Will they develop a scenario where Bangladesh accepts a flood of climate opportunist refugees seeking asylum to avoid being lynched in their home countries? They could be settled on some of the new land rising from the sea.