It’s perhaps symptomatic of the times that although experts have warned for years that the specter of global warming is real and could become catastrophic for the future of human life on the planet, it was when someone added up the economic cost of dealing with the threat that some people in power sat up and took notice. The occasion was the publication in late October of a report by a British government study group that contained a dire warning of the consequence of inaction and contained a pound and shilling rationale for action. The difference between moving now rather that latter, the report said, could mean a savings of as much as 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars a year.

Whether the report will produce the desired affect is another question. There is always the politics of getting anything done and what happens in Washington can be decisive.

Commenting on the study, chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern, the Financial Times wrote, “One reason why the U.S., or at least the Bush Administration, remains infuriatingly relaxed about climate change is that the US mainland is likely to remain untouched by rising sea levels.”

We’ll not exactly. Just ask the people in New Orleans.

One needn’t conclusively demonstrate a direct link between global warming and hurricane Katrina to prove the connection between that catastrophe and climate change. The Gulf Coast region lies at the mouth of the Mississippi Delta and the greatest early threat of rising sea levels lies in the deltas of the world – Mekong, Ganges, Brahmaputa, and the like. The Brahmaputa in Bangladesh is the one most often cited as facing the greatest threat. These deltas encompass what might be called marginal acreages; they are close to, or at, sea level. They flood as a matter of course. That’s why rice growing thrives in such places, why the delta in Louisiana and the Sacramento Delta in California are two of the world’s largest rice growing areas.

When Katrina hit last year, the people in Sacramento became nervous about the condition of the levees there, which are more advanced than those in the other delta areas. Last winter, the fortifications along the Sacramento River came close to being breached.

There is something else significant about the delta regions of the planet: they are largely inhabited by people of color.

According to the Stern report, “A rise in average temperatures of three or four Celsius is likely to increase sea levels between 20 and 80 centimeters, flooding out the homes of between 20 and 300 million people every year". The Stern report projects an increase of 10 million people affected by coastal flooding each year in Africa alone. The British daily Independent said, “South Asia is particularly vulnerable because of poor coastal defenses.”

So is Louisiana.

The Netherlands has a massive levee system to protect Dutch cities. Why nothing like it is projected for New Orleans is not an irrelevant question.

The Stern report says rise in temperatures of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, is "a real possibility for the next century. It could trigger a 10 percent global loss of economic wealth in the world, with people in poorer countries suffering disproportionately.” It adds that in a "worst case" the reduction could be 20 percent, with floods displacing 100 million people and together with drought, creating hundreds of millions of "climate refugees."

Those in the path of Katrina can tell the world a lot about climate refugees. According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, the August 2005 hurricane has produced 250,000 climate refugees. “Those of us who track the effects of global warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees would likely be in the South Pacific with the abandonment of Tuvalu or other low-lying islands,” Brown wrote Aug. 16. “We were wrong. The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the United States.”

Brown, an agricultural economist and global environment expert says, “Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico surface waters helped make Hurricane Katrina the most financially destructive hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere” and force a million people to relocate from the coast, many into neighboring states. “In some Mississippi Gulf Coast towns, Katrina’s powerful 28-foot-high storm surge (8.5 meters) did not leave a single structure standing,” says Brown. “There was nothing for evacuees to return to.”

Before Katrina, which took 1,300 lives, New Orleans had a population of 463,000. This July the number was estimated to be 214,000. Significant population loses are reported from several counties around the Gulf.

Storms like Katrina are early symptoms of the threat posed by the accelerated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Next come the rising temperatures that will melt glaciers causing sea levels to rise anywhere from three and a half inches to three feet by 2100 and warm ocean currents. This will not only inundate lowlands where hundreds of millions of people presently live, it will generate more powerful storms.

The areas facing the threat of rising sea levels as a result of warming temperatures are not limited to the deltas. The danger is real in some major coastal cities like London and New York. A recent study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) projected a sea level rise of 15 to 19 inches by the 2050s in New York City. If, on top of that, a storm were to cause the sea level to surge as little as 1.5 feet, areas like the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge could be underwater. Hurricanes are not unknown in the Big Apple. There was a big one in 1821 and another in 1938 that claimed 700 lives.

Brown says that what happened last August, and other recent destructive storms, is: “Only the beginning.” Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen by one degree Fahrenheit, but by 2100 it could rise by up to 10 degrees. “Interestingly, the country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane is also primarily responsible for global warming,” he says.

Which brings it all back home.

George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, has written that if we are to have a chance to prevent a temperature rise of 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the wealthier nations of the world will have to cut greenhouse gas emissions 90 percent by 2030. Stern estimates that to stabilize the amount of carbon in the atmosphere at least at a manageable level would cost 1 percent of annual world production output by 2050. Otherwise, the price of dealing with the resulting chaos, including, falling crop yields, enlarging deserts and huge increases in climate refugees will be five to 20 times higher. The risk, the report says, is of economic and social disruption "on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century."

The developed country that contributes most to the release of harmful greenhouse gases– 30 percent - is the United States, and this country is the major impediment to doing anything to deal with the situation. President George Bush effectively sabotaged the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming. In 2001, he outraged the world by rejecting the treaty which had been signed during the Clinton Administration but was never introduced into the Senate for confirmation. The Bush Administration continues to not only oppose Kyoto but to also encourage doubts about the reality of global warming. The conflict between Washington and London over climate change had its origins back then. "It was signed up to by every single nation on earth, and if America now tries to walk away ... I think this is not just an environmental issue, it's an issue of transatlantic global foreign policy,” British Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, said at the time.

That view was repeated last week by Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens, who wrote that “the White House seemed to be making a deliberate statement for disdain for multilateralism. Invading Iraq without the blessing of the United Nations was merely confirmation of a new nationalism in Washington. The climate change disagreement thus testifies to a profound diverge of values.”

The British study’s findings came on the eve of the second meeting of the countries that signed Kyoto that got underway in Nairobi, Kenya this week. Some observers have pointed to the choice of location for the meeting as symbolic. Climate change already is having serious impacts on peoples' lives across Africa and is set to get much worse unless urgent action is taken, according to Friends of the Earth (FOE). ''There must be a greater commitment to the needs of the most vulnerable countries, which are already bearing the brunt of climate change,'' said FOE international climate campaigner Catherine Pearce.

After the President ditched the Kyoto Agreement, the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati said it was already experiencing coastal erosion, droughts and severe storms as sea levels rose. "It is a terrible economic problem, it is our very survival," said Baranika Etuati, the country’s acting Director of Environment and Conservation .

It is quite believable, as the Financial Times editors suggest, that the U.S. President is unmoved by the threat posed by climate change because he believes that in the short run “the US mainland is likely to remain untouched by rising sea levels.” If so, it’s extremely short-sighted and irresponsible – aside from being untrue. But for the people of Kiribati and the Gulf Coast and the deltas of the world where there are so many people of color, it’s more than that: It’s environmental racism.

BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

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