THE CURRENT FORECAST CALLS FOR A LESS-PRONOUNCED WEAKENING PRIOR TO LANDFALL THAN THE PREVIOUS FORECAST DUE TO THIS ENHANCED UPPER LEVEL OUTFLOW. THE TRACK REASONING HAS NOT CHANGED SINCE THE LAST FORECAST. THE STORM IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE TRACKING NORTHWARD UNTIL MAKING LANDFALL IN WESTERN BANGLADESH…

Word from news reports and business colleagues in Bangladesh is that the response has been a bit delayed, but is now in full swing. The problem is that they have literally millions of people to evacuate from low-lying land over inadequate infrastructure. While Bangladesh is no stranger to cyclones, I believe we are seeing the impacts of climate change — and so too do the people of Bangladesh.

A gathering in the Capital earlier this week focused on raising the profile of efforts to adapt to climate impacts. Already, says this article in Newsday, Bangladesh is dealing with loss of land in a country the size of Missouri crammed with 150 million people.

Climate change is the simplest explanation for the increased frequency and intensity of storms, and consistent with the scientific consensus found in the IPCC reports. As Bill McKibben notes, "Even using its conservative projections, the panel states unequivocally that typhoons and hurricanes will likely become more intense; that sea ice will shrink and perhaps disappear in the summertime Arctic; that snow cover will contract."

Sidr, as of the last estimate, is gusting 160kts with sustained winds of 130kts, thus at the top end of a category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Seas have gone from 30 feet to 40 feet over the past 24 hrs and the storm surge will likely go very far inland indeed.

Those least capable in dealing with these impacts, and least responsible for burning fossil fuels, are going to be impacted the most.

More in comments as I get more information.

The same could be said of many other issues, of course, but what distinguishes climate change is that it is perceived as "an act of God" on which individual actions have only minimal impact. Unless it is linked to issues of social justice, energy security, economic growth, and the aspirations of a growing middle class in developing countries, support for action on climate change will remain pegged to the fortunes and attention of environmental liberals in the developed North.

While on a recent trip to Pakistan, shortly after the Nobel Committee’s Peace Prize announcement, I asked several people, "What do you think of Al Gore and the climate change issue winning the Nobel Peace Prize?" or alternatively, "What do you think climate change means for you and Pakistan?" Even to me these questions seemed ridiculous given what’s going on in Pakistan — especially the events of the past week, whenpa a U.S.-sponsored general showed what kind of friend he is to democracy. Answers ranged widely, from a sophisticated intellectual who had attended a viewing of Al Gore’s film as part of a film discussion club, to people who had heard of Clinton but not Al Gore, to a few who said they had never heard of climate change.

I looked in vain for any mention of climate change in the opinion pages of local newspapers, and while there was vibrant debate over important international issues (e.g., the nature of democracy, government ineptitude, pollution, poverty, the U.S. playing kingmaker, and energy shortages), there was nothing on climate policy. (Aside, that is, from glowing mention in a few blogs of the fact that one Pakistani national, Professor Adil Najam at Tufts University in the U.S., is a member of the IPCC and thus partial recipient of the Nobel Prize — read his blog here.)

A well-educated business man I spoke with had an informed opinion about climate change, summed up as: "Yes, it is occurring. We are the cause of it, so we should be able to solve it." We spoke about how the older generation had noticed the changes from their childhoods: the winters are shorter, the summers hotter and earlier, and the River Ravi — celebrated by poets for hundreds of years as it wound past the gardens of Moghul palaces — is now mostly a dry bed. In addition, monsoons this past year killed hundreds in Karachi — a function of poverty, heavier-than-normal rains, and poor civic planning.

When it came to renewable energy, or any energy policy, Pakistanis I spoke with had strong and nuanced views that I doubt I can adequately reproduce here; suffice it to say that energy supplies and politics in Pakistan are closely entwined. Huge shortfalls in grid production are leading to widespread "load shedding," and this means that when I mentioned home solar panel systems, I heard several enthusiastic responses — especially given that the cost of petrol used in home generators is going up.

All of this does point the way toward a pragmatic climate approach, one that is explicitly not an "environmental issue" but rather fully intertwined with reforming government and its dysfunctional role as energy provider, ensuring a prosperous and civic-minded middle class, and creating forward-looking strategies to save lives from flood, drought, and heat waves.

In a country like Pakistan, where democracy is at stake and tens of millions live in poverty, the solutions frame, based on small incremental steps, holds the only promise: small-scale rural and urban renewable energy projects, perhaps organized in a smart-grid fashion; compressed natural gas mini-cars enabled through tax rebates; investments in public transit by private companies; water storage solutions sold at a steep discount; low-energy air conditioning tied to demand pricing; urban density planning; energy-efficient, flood-protected public housing, etc.

Responses to climate change should not be put in a box as an altruistic thing to do, but should be a central component to improving the well-being of people around the world and promoting stable, prosperous democracies.

If Gandhi were around today, I think he would be less reasonable and tractable about the climate crisis; instead, he would challenge the moral integrity of so-called western civilization. The galvanizing march to the salt flats (the famous “Salt March”) would be a tour of threatened island nations: Inuit seeking redress for loss of habitat, mountain people facing bewildering change, deluges in Bangladesh, landslides in the Philippines, and masses of people in the Indus-Ganges-Yangtze river basins facing an uncertain future over water supplies. It would be a march to bear witness to the moral wrongness that pervades the fossil-fuel civilization. It would not, my fellow environmentalists, be the image of a stranded polar bear, regardless of how signatory a phenomena.

In May I was in Pakistan, and I have traveled in that region for several years working on microfinance strategies aimed at bringing people out of poverty and — I would suggest — building local financial institutions that can survive the coming climate onslaught. I learned that historically much of Pakistan’s electrical power generation comes from hydroelectric and geothermal sources; but with 7-8 percent growth rates fueling more air conditioners and refrigeration, a drop in river flow from the Himalayan snowpack, and a 150-percent-plus growth rate in car sales, the carbon footprint for the (at least) 170 million Pakistanis is increasing rapidly. And unless it can get off this American-style sprawl-and-consume model, the problem will become exponentially larger over the next few years. As I wrote on nextbillion.net, energy is a key issue for this country and any developing country in this region.

This is not to say I agree with Mr. Bush, who has again linked U.S. action with concurrent action by China and India. To agree with the head-in-the-oil-sands neocons, I would need to believe in the rightness of the equivalent of the used-car salesman telling me to slash the tires of the car I just bought from him because he was tired of being stuck in traffic. Or, the moral equivalent of “let them eat cake.”

Because, as Bono has so rightly stated in the recent edition of Vanity Fair, there is a poverty crisis now with millions dying in Africa alone, never mind a future “environmental” calamity. Governments faced with such a situation, and expecting to stay in power, cannot deny the energy-consuming aspirations of their populations. Nor should they; the correlation between lack of electrical supplies and poverty is clear even if causation is not. There is a failure of leadership and imagination to find ways to link the local village- and city-level decisions about energy use and generation with the very urgent need for climate solutions — people are buying generators to cope with totally inadequate electrical supplies because the generators are cheaper. It’s absurd — after all the warnings and discussions, there are currently no easy mechanisms for internalizing the externalities of so many millions of decisions.

I was on an IM chat with colleagues in Bangladesh a few days ago and was dismayed but not entirely surprised to hear that Chittagong, a city of nearly 4 million people (in a country of 130 million) was under four to six feet of water from a 30-year storm that dropped three inches of rain per hour, overwhelming the inadequate drainage systems, closing the airport, cutting communication, shutting down the TV station, and suspending microfinance operations across a wide swath of the area. Dozens of people had been killed, and since then the lack of pumping stations and clean water is creating the possibility for cholera and other disease outbreaks. These stories, remote to most of us, drive home that there are human costs to this uncontrolled experiment with our atmosphere.

The question posed by those in the carbon-tax vs. carbon-trading regime debate on this blog has real meaning for the majority of the world’s population. We will need these two items as part of a new policy-regulatory-economic regime, but we need more. It is high time for unreasonable people to propose ways to tax, penalize, and overthrow the status quo.