Saturday - March 10, 2012

Fake And Inaccurate

An Army of Andrews fights all the BS memes, all the time.  I found this one at CNN this morning while looking for news stories. It’s a 15 picture photo essay of the Por ‘n Starvin’, their harmonious-with-nature home brought low by Glowball Warming!!!1111!!

On the shore of a vanishing island

Daesung Lee sees global connections the rest of us often don’t recognize or choose not to dwell on.

Lee, an international photojournalist, spent two months photographing the people of Ghoramara Island, located in the Ganges Delta region in India’s West Bengal state. The island has been dramatically affected by global climate change.

“I have researched the effect of global warming, which is caused by mass consumption and pollution. Since the 1980s, more than 50% of the Ghoramara has vanished due to erosion by the sea. As a result two-thirds of the population have moved away from the island,” Lee says.

“This world is more connected than we can imagine by globalization. Most of the products we use for everyday life are produced by people we never know.”

He says many people who aren’t involved in the consumption of these products become “environmental refugees.”

“I hope people realize that climate change is more serious than we know and we have a major responsibility for it. I also hope people consider the impact that our consumption has on the world … and make efforts to reduce it by recycling products and using them long term.”

Working on the remote island had its challenges. With no electricity, Lee was forced to leave the island to go to the mainland every three days to charge his camera batteries.

He posed villagers on the shore and took portraits of them in juxtaposition with the beauty of the vanishing island.

“The villagers in Ghoramara have begun to save money in preparation to buy new farms,” Lee says. “I could see the traces of a heritage vanishing by the rising tides. Exposed roots of plants destroyed by the erosion serve to illustrate the absence of foundation in the lives of these people. The sea is swallowing up their past, while their future remains unknown.”

– Robert W. Johnson, CNN

What he isn’t telling you is that the island of Ghoramara is little more than a hump of mud on the outside edge of a bend in the Rupnarayan River where it dumps into the Bay of Bengal at the north end of the Indian Ocean. It’s a pile of silt with some grass growing on it. As anyone who knows anything about rivers knows, they are constantly changing. Riverine silt islands come and go all the time. It’s just that in this overpopulated and poorest corner of the Turd World, people will live on any piece of somewhat dry ground they can find. In this case, there was probably no more room in the nearby town of Kakdwip (is that the ancestral home of Barney Frank??) and it was either live on the silt pile or share the stanky mangrove swamp to the East with a bunch of tigers. Climate change, global warming, increased consumption, and insufficient recycling have nothing to do with this eroding mud pile whatsoever. But it does make a better picture than some lone polar bear clinging to a bit of sea ice, right? And most folks won’t even read the whole one paragraph story, they’ll just look at the pictures. And then Blame Bush.

See the map at Wiki, or Google Map up 21.916667, 88.129722.

Fight the meme. Do not accept the lie.

PS - the Rupnarayan River was dammed some years ago, some miles upstream at Kolaghat, for a hydropower generator. This lowered the level of the river, perhaps allowing this pile of silt mud to surface and dry out in the first place. The province of West Bengal is in desperate need of electricity, so it is entirely probable that the electricity people - government employees - have been running more water through their turbines to produce it. That would put more water in the river, which would in turn rise up in level, and erode or drown the mud island as it should have done all along.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/10/2012 at 11:08 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • News-Briefs •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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