http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/climatesos/2009/12/2009121454853960408.htmlHungry tides in India's Sundarbans
As global leaders from both rich and developing nations wind down the debate over climate change in Copenhagen, Sheikh Aftauddin, a 65-year-old climate migrant from a submerged island on India's Sundarbans archipelago, continues to live in uncertainty.
One of the nearly 8,000 climate change refugees in the Indian Sundarbans, Aftauddin says they are unaware what is being debated in Copenhagen.
All he knows is how the fury of nature devoured his hut and farmlands on the Goramara island, one of the many submerged by the rising sea, forcing him to live as a refugee in another area.
"The sea took away everything. My house, my land. It is painful to live uprooted but I have no choice," says Aftauddin who now lives on Sagar Island, part of the Sundarban archipelago and 150km south of Kolkata.
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Climate change is also threatening the famous Royal Bengal tiger population of the Sundarbans archipelago.
(wonder if the tigers will be refugees to in order to save them?)
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and
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/climatesos/2009/12/20091278368975161.htmlKashmir's climate frontline
"We used to have good money in saffron," says Ali Mohammed, a weathered 46-year-old farmer, as he looks over the fields of purple flowers ready for the autumn harvest in Indian-administered Kashmir. "But now no rain for months, bad saffron crop this year."
Used as a spice and for medicinal purposes, saffron has been grown in Kashmir for millennia. Mohammed's family have farmed the crop for five generations, but as the weather patterns in Kashmir change, they wonder how much longer their business can survive.
(they have just started growing saffron in Afghanistan)
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The thousands of glaciers in the Western Himalaya Mountains that wind through Kashmir are receding as fast as any on the planet, melting due to increased temperatures.
This causes heavy flooding in the region, which is followed by drought during critical planting times. The early glacier melt, combined with a decrease in rainfall and snowfall, directly affects farmers like Mohammed.
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"The increase in temperatures will also have an effect on drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower," he says.
Dr. Jim Jarvie heads the Climate Unit at Mercy Corps, an international aid agency. "Countries around the world who find themselves dependent on glacial water systems will have two interrelated shocks in store," he says.
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and
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/2009121225338198982.htmlRising waters threaten Louisiana
The southern coast of Louisiana in the United States is among the fastest disappearing areas in the world.
Rising waters have led to the state losing a land mass equivalent to 30 football fields every day.
And as the communities disappear, more and more people are leaving the region.
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lets take the above information and shove it up Rep. Joe Barton's behind