Answer Time and A Little Discussion on Global Climate Change... aka On Thin Ice: Hoi An, Vietnam- June 19, 2007.

The Places Affected by Global Climate Change: Everywhere

Xin chao! We’ve just passed the one month mark in Vietnam and have begun exploring the lands that once constituted South Vietnam. Already, we’ve had the opportunity to visit the DMZ and Hue City, two of the most important sites in Vietnam’s recent history. But before we tell you all about that, we thought we’d take a moment to answer a few questions and talk about something that’s been in the news quite a bit recently- global climate change. Starting it all off, we want to wish a belated Happy Father's Day to our dads, without whose support we'd still be sitting at home dreaming about this trip.

Cheesy, we know, but Vietnam doesn't have Hallmark cards. We thought this Shanghai storefront said it all.

The first question came from Cindy and regarded bird flu in Vietnam. As most of you are probably already aware, bird flu (H5N1 virus) is a considerable problem in China, SE Asia, and Asia in general. In fact, our travels seem to have us following outbreaks of the dreaded virus. Just prior to arriving in Moscow, an outbreak was reported in one of its rural suburbs. China, of course, has had several bouts with avian flu over the last few years. On our first night in Vietnam, we treated ourselves to dinner at Sapa’s Baguette et Chocolatte, a restaurant favored by western tourists. There, we got our first chance to read one of Vietnam’s English language newspapers. The headline story was about an outbreak of bird flu in one of Vietnam’s southern provinces. In hindsight, this isn’t at all surprising. Since arriving in Vietnam, we’ve spent more than our fair share of time mingling with poultry. Chickens roam the streets freely and often pop in to sidewalk cafes to visit during lunch. Domesticated ducks waddle along the road and paddle around in flooded rice paddies. In the countryside, poultry is everywhere, and all of it appears to be almost 100% unregulated. The most recent outbreaks have occurred in larger farms dedicated to commercial endeavors. Thankfully, these seem to be more regulated, and the outbreaks have been detected, contained, and announced without delay. To us, this is fairly noteworthy. After two months in China, where all information deemed unfavorable to the state’s image is censored, hidden, or at the very least delayed in being reported, the candor of Vietnam’s government and media regarding health crisis such as this is refreshing and unexpected. Of course, all of this is probably of little comfort to the rural farmers whose birds go relatively unscreened. As for us, the bird flu marathon looks to continue. An outbreak was reported in one of Kuala Lumpur’s suburbs a few weeks ago at just about the time we started plotting a visit to Malaysia. Hopefully this trend doesn’t continue. We have to come home sometime, and we’d like to leave the virus behind.

P.S. on the bird flu question- We posted this at about 11 a.m. today, and then went for a walk around town. At about 8:30 p.m., we settled down to have dinner at a secluded little cafe off of one of Hoi An's main drags. Being somewhat sick of seafood, Ben started salivating when he saw sauteed sweet and sour chicken on the menu. When he ordered, the waitress shook her head and said "sorry, no chicken now." One of the restaurant's managers instantly appeared and explained the situation. "Haven't you heard? There's been chicken flu in this province. There are no chickens anywhere. It's really bad!" What timing! Clearly, bird flu is going to continue to pose a substantial challenge to the Vietnamese for some time to come. We had pizza instead.

A close encounter with a couple of chickens near Bac Ha, Vietnam. Throughout rural Vietnam, domesticated chickens and ducks roam freely in people's modest dwellings, in the rice paddies, and along the roads.

Another question came from Joe. He wondered about the impacts of storms on the floating villages of Halong Bay. While tropical storms do hit the region throughout the summer, the villages are fairly protected by the tower karst forest surrounding them. Waves are a combination of several factors, the most important in this case being fetch. Fetch is simply the distance waves have had to travel- growing as they do so. More specifically, fetch is the distance of water that the wind (which is the principle cause of surface waves) has blown over. This is why small lakes don't generate large waves- there simply isn't enough open water for the wind to travel over. The walls of limestone jutting out of Halong Bay’s waters serve to interrupt this fetch, keeping waves to a less threatening size. Also, the strong winds associated with storms in this area are coming from the east. The villages are on the leeward side of Cat Ba Island, sheltered from the worst of the winds by its bulk. We are more concerned with the fate of the low coastal villages on the southern coast of Cat Ba. They seem to be virtually unprotected from winds and waves, putting their homes, boats, and rice fields in jeopardy. There is no tower karst to break the waves, and no hills to redirect the wind. Considering how vulnerable these coastal villages are to storms, we wondered about their fate given the current trends of global climate change- something we’d like to discuss here.

Halong Bay's floating village is protected from storms by Cat Ba and the other islands in the archipelago.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
During our recent bouts with illness, injury, and heat exhaustion, we’ve had to spend more time than we’d like within the air conditioned confines of our hotel rooms. If this had happened in China, we would have lost our minds. It hasn’t been all that much fun in Vietnam either, but the experience has been made more tolerable by one thing- uncensored satellite television. Most Vietnamese T.V. is brought in via Thailand, meaning we’ve had access to our beloved BBC News. So, we’ve gotten to catch up on current events. Our downtime corresponded directly with the most recent G-8 summit, the annual meeting between the leaders of the world’s top eight economic powers (U.S.A, Germany, U.K., France, Canada, Italy, Russia, and Japan). Germany hosted this most recent summit, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel made global climate change the primary focus. Her goal, along with most of the other participating nations, was to establish concrete targets on reducing CO2 emissions by the middle of this century. Standing in the way, as usual, was the United States.

A few months ago, we referenced an article that claimed 13% of U.S. citizens hadn’t even heard of global climate change. This disturbed us. As frightening as that was, it didn’t bother us nearly as much as this recent episode of mind-blowing stupidity at the G-8 (we know that an agreement was reached, but from what we understand, it was far less substantial than the one originally proposed by the European nations). The scientific evidence suggesting a manmade component to this unprecedented era of climate change is irrefutable. All that’s lacking at this stage is a written confession from the atmosphere and your car’s exhaust pipe. Still, there are those in high places who choose to ignore this evidence in order to pursue their own or their nation’s agendas. Most of these people have ties to the oil industry: the industry that has the most to lose from a turn away from fossil fuels (can any of you name someone in a position of power who has ties to the oil industry?). The main arguments against capping greenhouse gas emissions (more on those in a moment) stem from the desire to maintain economic growth. On the surface, this seems to be a more benevolent and justifiable reason for questioning the need to take such measures- that is in comparison to the desire for personal gain. But it doesn’t take a genius to find the flaws in this argument. Over the short term, caps on industrial emissions will have a detrimental impact on the economies of developed nations. Over the long haul, a failure to act now will be absolutely devastating. The flooding of financial centers like New York and Shanghai can’t be good for the global economy. The displacement of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people from coastal population centers will be environmentally, economically, and politically nightmarish. Huge portions of the world will go without water, while others will be inundated with so much that floating villages like the ones we saw in Halong Bay will become highly profitable real estate. And if something isn’t done soon, it will all happen. Climate change (more often referred to as global warming, an unfortunate and inaccurate misnomer) is not some grandiose communist plot dreamed up by liberal academics and designed to squash good ol’ American industry. It’s real, it’s here, and it’s happening right now as we write this post. But what is it?

A floating home in Halong Bay- the Hollywood Hills of future real estate?

Climate change is a fairly simple concept, with a hugely complex set of causes. Throughout long-term global history, the Earth has undergone a series of climatic changes- things like ice ages and inter-glacial periods. The average global temperature has been both several degrees warmer and several degrees colder than it is today. There are multiple reasons why historical climate change has happened. At times, the sun itself gives off less energy. Periods of exceptionally high volcanism can also have an impact. For instance, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 made global temperatures fall for several years. There is a litany of other natural causes affecting historical global climate fluctuations. Save for a few traumatic episodes following meteor collisions and the like, these fluctuations have been incredibly gradual, only measurable over the course of geologic time. What is terrifying is when, like now, it occurs at such a dramatic rate. Species, including humans, have almost no time to adapt to their new environment, and large-scale extinctions occur. Doesn’t sound too pleasant, does it? There are a few reasons why climate change is happening so rapidly today, but the one we have most control over is the influx of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere.

One of the industrial dinosaurs still belching out greenhouse gasses in central Russia.

At normal levels, greenhouse gasses serve the critical role of insulating our planet, trapping long-wave, infrared radiation at the surface. This keeps us from losing too much heat into the atmosphere and becoming a frozen wasteland. When we burn fossil fuels, however, we are adding drastically to the level of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, among others). This increased insulation traps too much radiation, and our planet warms. In addition to higher temperatures on land, glaciers and polar ice caps begin to melt- reducing the reflectivity (or albedo) of the Earth and absorbing more radiation from the sun (albedo could also help us out a bit- most projections show an increase in cloud cover as temperatures warm. Cloud tops are white and reflective, and will thus bounce more insolation back into space, thus acting as a negative feedback mechanism). The influx of cold, fresh water from the melting ice disrupts currents in the oceans, and can interfere with such crucial patterns as the Gulf Stream. One of the reasons the term “global warming” is considered inaccurate is that several parts of the globe could potentially become much colder. If the Gulf Stream stops, northwestern Europe would get substantially colder- even though they are currently experiencing one of the warmest summers on record.

How the system normally works: Short wave radiation from the sun warms the Earth's surface, and long wave radiation is emitted from the Earth and back into space. Greenhouse gases (CO2, water vapor, methane) in the atmosphere trap some of this outgoing radiation, thus keeping surface temperatures warm and pleasant. But when greenhouse gas levels rise as they have over the last several decades, less of the long wave radiation finds its way back into space- thus, Earth's temperature increases to unnatural levels. This causes a variety of other things to occur (melting glaciers, ocean current disruption, excessive cloud formation) that act as positive or negative feedback mechanisms.

But how can we be relatively sure that man is the primary cause of recent climate change? In our opinions, there are two crystal clear lines of evidence that prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. First, you can see a direct correlation between rising temperatures and the development of modern industry. As soon as man started utilizing carbon based fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures started to rise. Of course, doubters point to a few deviations (caused by other variables) in the trend to try to prove that climate change is all a myth, but the long term chart shows an undeniably dramatic increase in temperatures and CO2 levels since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The second reason is even simpler. Anyone with an ounce of logic can figure it out. If greenhouse gases trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere, and we are pumping incredible volumes of greenhouse gases into that atmosphere, then doesn’t it logically follow that we are at least part of the cause of the problem? A+B=C. It’s a simple equation. If we can all agree on A, and we all know B to be true, then how in the hell have we not reached a consensus on C? Baffling!

WHAT WE'VE SEEN SO FAR

But alas, the point of this whole exercise isn’t to editorialize. We are clearly quite passionate about the issue, so it’s difficult not to throw our two cents in. Maybe that’s because we’ve seen so much on this trip that has awakened us further to the perils that lie ahead. That’s what we really want to talk about now- specific examples of the causes and affects of climate change from the places we’ve visited. We’ll start with Russia, our partners in reluctance when it comes to addressing this frightening trend.

RUSSIA
One of the many inefficient power plants dotting the Russian landscape.

Russia is a nation built on oil. Moscow’s neon lights glitter in the cold night air because Gazprom, the state-owned gas giant, has control of the gas taps throughout Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus. Oil and gas are Russia’s chief geopolitical weapon, and any country within their sphere of energy dependence can expect to have the pipelines closed should they fall out of favor with Papa Putin. It’s little wonder then that Russia has been nearly as reluctant as the United States when it comes to institutionalizing CO2 emission caps. The nation’s economy and the posh livelihoods of Russia’s oligarchs depend on Gazprom’s revenues, and those in power are predictably unwilling to take the measures necessary to stave off environmental catastrophe. It’s easy for the Moscow elite to ignore the encroaching crisis from their high rise apartments and luxury SUV’s. It’s not so easy when you are living a subsistence lifestyle on an island in the middle of a Siberian lake.

St. Basil's Cathedral, a symbol of Moscow, illuminated at night. Russia's big cities (and elite citizens) have built themselves on oil money, while more fragile areas face the immediate consequences of climate change.

Olkhon Island is one of the many places already feeling the effects of climate change. The island’s residents depend upon fishing and farming to sustain their lives. Lake Baikal is the source of life, and if it becomes inaccessible, the residents of Kuzhir, Karantzi, and the island’s other settlements are in serious trouble. During the summer, the lake and the mainland are easily accessible via boat. People can fish and make it to nearby Irkutsk to stock up on other supplies with relative ease. During the winter, though, such endeavors are dependent upon the thickness of the lake’s ice. If the ice doesn’t reach a certain thickness, than the heavy trucks and vans favored by the locals cannot venture out to ice fish (a very important part of the local lifestyle) or to cross over to the mainland village of MRS and Irkutsk. This is precisely what happened this past year.

A pair of ice fishermen head out onto Lake Baikal. Residents of Olkhon Island depend on the thickness of ice for transportation during the winter.

The lake had iced over, but never attained the desirable thickness until later in the season. The lake was inaccessible via boat because of the ice (Russia is famous for its icebreakers, but not too many of them are cruising the frigid waters of Lake Baikal), but the ice was too thin to accommodate wheeled vehicles. By the time we arrived in late February, the ice was already showing signs of significant weakening. In fact, many of the routes onto and off of the lake had to be abandoned because of unseasonably thin ice. It’s been like that for the last few years, we were told by some of the locals. In the past, it had never been a problem. The lake had always frozen over early in the winter and had remained solid well into spring. Now, with increased temperatures, the ice is unpredictable and often inadequate, and people on the island are left stranded and without access to the lake or the rest of Russia.

Ice along the shore of Olkhon Island. This past year the lake froze up late in the winter and began to break up early in the spring, leaving residents stranded for weeks while the ice was too thin to cross safely.

MONGOLIA
Nomads in the Gobi Desert are barely surviving in their harsh climate, which stands to get far harsher if current trends continue.

From what we could see, Mongolia’s main problem is also water related. Mongolia’s pastoral nomads have proven themselves resilient in a water-scarce environment for thousands of years. Environmental hardship is nothing new to those who call a ger in the Gobi Desert home. They have found ways around water scarcity. They utilize drought adapted animals such as camels and they live lifestyles that inherently conserve water. Indoor plumbing, flush toilets, and personal showers are non-existent commodities even in the larger Gobi settlements such as Dalandzadgad. They’ve found a way to make it all work. But their lives teeter precariously upon a very fine line. They’ve carved out a livelihood (albeit a rough one) in an extremely sensitive and forbidding environment, but what happens if things change just a little bit? Can Mongolia’s nomads survive if levels of precipitation fall, even if the fall is incredibly minute? What happens if they can’t adapt to an altered environment? Do they all migrate to Ulaanbaatar in search of employment?

Even with drought-adapted animals like goats and camels, Gobi herders are living on the edge of survival in their harsh environment.

Children at a communal well in Dalandzadgad. Residents of the Gobi already limit their water usage to the bare minimum- what happens when there's even less available?

From what we saw of Ulaanbaatar, the city wouldn’t be able to accommodate much of a population boom. The homeless and unemployed already make up a startlingly significant proportion of the urban population, and the ger shanty towns on the outskirts of the city don’t have much room to grow- they already extend to the base of the surrounding mountains. And what would fill the economic vacuum should the predominant lifestyle shift from nomadic to urban? Mongolia could, in theory, become a miniaturized Asian Tiger (an Asian Gobi Bear?), utilizing a cheap labor force to crank out consumer goods and textiles. But Mongolia’s population is small, and the industrial and transportation infrastructures are severely lacking. If they do intend to build up their industrial base, they will most likely do so in the manner of most other third world nations- with little to no regard for environmental considerations. In essence, the problem could very well cause them to be a greater part of the problem.

Ulaanbaatar- there's no room for this capital city to grow, as it's already crowded to the edge of its valley and facing high unemployment rates. If rural people are forced to migrate to the city, how will they live?

CHINA
The streets of Shanghai- the largest city in the most populous country in the world. As China's population grows and its standard of living rises, its energy needs multiply.

It’s highly unlikely (nay, impossible) that Mongolia will ever be as much a part of the problem as China, however. New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman once said of China (paraphrasing here) that he didn’t think we had much to worry about from a country that censors Google. For the most part, we think he’s right. We had the opportunity to visit and listen to the goings on in Chinese schools, and can attest to the fact that ingenuity and free-thinking are discouraged, while rote memorization and blind loyalty are encouraged. They might own a ghastly proportion of our national debt and be a budding economic powerhouse, but the overall standard of living and quality of life is abysmal. The country is politically and geographically fractious and only held together through brutal political repression. Militarily and politically, we simply have no reason to feel threatened by China. No, we don’t have much to worry about in those respects. But we should all be scared to death of what they are doing to the environment. China’s incredible economic growth has been fueled by coal. All along the Yangtze, ships are loaded up with the little balls of carbon and sent up and down river to smoke-belching power plants and factories. The perpetually grey, smoggy skies throughout the entire eastern half of the country (where most of the industrial growth has taken place) provide a visual testament to this phenomenon. The Chinese thirst for oil is also insatiable, and they’ve staked claims in places as close to home as Alberta. As more and more Chinese citizens pull themselves out of poverty and into the middle class, more and more cars start showing up on the roads. In Kunming, for instance, it often took us half an hour to travel three miles by taxi. The situation was similar in Xi’an, Beijing, Shanghai, and even Lhasa. The traffic jams are incredible, as are the amounts of greenhouse gases released by the automobiles involved in them.

A coal ship loads up near Maoping on the Yangtze River. Coal is one of China's primary sources of energy, and the reason why this picture, and almost all of our others from China, look as if they were taken in a steam room. The air in eastern China is nearly always smoggy, grey, and miserable.

Ironically, China stands to be one of the greatest victims of climate change. Again, water is one of the principal factors. Let’s start in Tibet, high on the Himalayan Plateau. On our failed excursion to Namtso Lake, we were told that we were going to be visiting a glacier. On the way back to Lhasa, we began wondering where this alleged glacier was hiding. We asked Denzig where it was. He pointed off towards a row of mountains nearby. We squinted, strained our eyes, craned our necks, and looked at each other completely perplexed. As Alaskans, we felt somewhat qualified to identify a glacier, but we didn’t see anything but hills with a light dusting of snow. Finally, we saw it nestled into a tiny cirque near the top of one of these mountains. That’s how it is throughout the Himalayas- the glaciers are disappearing with alarming rapidity. This is somewhat annoying to a gaggle of tourists with altitude sickness, but it’s a major crisis for a huge proportion of the world’s population.

The Tibetan Plateau's well runneth dry. The plateau is the source of much of Asia's fresh water, but diminishing glaciers and low snow years are causing rivers such as the Yangtze to run progressively lower. When we arrived in Tibet in early April, the mountains were nearly devoid of snow and glaciers were almost non-existent.

It's already rough going in most of Central Asia. It will only get worse as temperatures warm and precipitation levels fall.

Asia’s most important rivers have their headwaters in the mountain snows of the Himalayas. The Yangtze, China’s longest river and a major transportation network, a vast source of fresh water, and the home of the Three Gorges Dam, has its roots on the plateau. So does the Brahmaputra, a major source of fresh water for India and Bangladesh- two of the world’s most populous countries. Southeast Asia’s Mekong is also a product of the Tibetan Plateau. Himalayan glaciers provide the water that keeps these rivers flowing. Thus, if the glaciers go away, so do the rivers. That leaves the world’s two most populous countries (China, India) without two of their major sources of fresh water, a situation that could easily lead to a humanitarian disaster and regional conflict. Don’t believe us? Examine the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the West Bank from a perspective divorced from religion and see what you come up with. The root of that conflict really lies in access rights to the water from the Jordan River. Now think of what could happen in a region where 2 billion thirsty people (whose governments have large militaries with nuclear weapons) are fighting for limited water resources. It’s already happening along the Indian-Pakistani border, where five major rivers flow from the Indian side into water-scarce Pakistan. As the Indians use more and more of the water, less reaches Pakistan- encouraging them to seek greater control of the borderlands (and hence the rivers) and spawning numerous violent clashes. On our cruise down the Yangtze, we noted with alarm that the river was several meters below the normal waterline. This could have something to do with the dam- but we think it’s most likely the result of glacial retreat in the Himalayas. If the river runs dry, what happens to the Three Gorges Dam? That’s clean energy the equivalent of 18 nuclear power-plants that’s no longer available. How does that energy get replaced? By the burning of more fossil fuels?

China's Yangtze River, whose headwaters lie in the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. Note the low waterline- where the trees stop and the white, polished rock begins. We're not sure if this is a result of something going on at the dam, or a dry year in Tibet. Given what we saw earlier in Tibet, we're inclined to believe the latter.

China's Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. The dam is projected to generate power equivelant to 18 nuclear power plants, but how will decreasing water levels on the Yangtze affect those projections?

Let’s shift our attention to China’s lucrative and heavily populated eastern seaboard. Our only stop over there was in Shanghai, “new” China’s showcase city and home to over 20 million people. We’ve all seen computer derived projections of sea level rise should the polar and Greenlandic ice caps melt (it’s happening right now). It’s pretty alarming stuff. New York City, San Francisco, New Orleans, southern Florida, all kinds of places right in the United States flooded and made uninhabitable. It will happen in China as well. Significant portions of the eastern seaboard could end up underwater, thus forcing hundreds of millions of people west. But where do they go? Tibet appears to be nearing its carrying capacity already, and Xinjiang and the Taklamakan Desert don’t seem to be environmentally friendly options either. This isn’t even taking into consideration the political difficulties of greater Han influxes into these already unstable provinces. We also shouldn’t forget that, should sea-levels rise as projected, many places in southern Asia like Bangladesh (what a geographical nightmare of a country) will also be flooded- thus sending a hundred-million-man pool of refugees north into the same places the displaced Chinese will be heading. It’s a nightmare waiting to happen, and it’s not going to wait much longer.

We've posted a few pretty pictures of Shanghai's Pudong New Area, but more often than not, this is what the skyline looks like- grey, miserable, and polluted. It won't look much better if it's underwater.

VIETNAM
The entrance to Cat Ba Town's fishing port. Vietnam's coastal fishermen stand to lose a great deal from climate change.

On the surface, Vietnam seems to be less a cause of climate change and at less risk than its Asian contemporaries. At least in the places we’ve been so far, industry is minimal and energy needs negligible. Personal cars are nearly non-existent, as most people use public transportation, motorbikes, or old fashioned bicycles to get around. Dig a little deeper, however, and you see that Vietnam is not immune from the pitfalls of climate change. Most of the coastal communities are dependent upon fishing. Many of the people are living near-subsistence lifestyles- eating the fish, shrimp, crabs, and octopi they catch and selling the excess to make a few spare dong (Vietnamese currency). Most of these mouthwatering aquatic specimens live near Vietnam’s coral reefs. Reefs are ecologically lucrative, but also incredibly sensitive. The world’s reefs have been one of the hardest hit commodities during the era of rapid warming. As the reefs die, the diverse marine ecosystems they support are also put at risk. That means that coast-dwelling Vietnamese are soon going to have to dramatically alter their lifestyles. If fishing becomes unprofitable, or doesn’t put food on the table in the kitchen of the floating shack, then tens of thousands of Vietnamese are going to face starvation and impoverishment.

Fishing boats on Cat Ba Island's southern coast. Fishing is an essential part of the Vietnamese lifestyle, and coastal communities will suffer as reef ecosystems diminish in the wake of a warming climate.

They won’t be the only ones threatened by starvation due to climate change in Vietnam. Vietnam is the world’s second largest exporter of rice. Since the doi moi reforms of the mid 1980’s, rice production has been put back in the hands of the farmers with obviously impressive results. Many of the rice paddies responsible for this surge in production are located along the low, coastal plains of the east coast. Recently, scientists have engineered a salt water resistant strain of rice, but we don’t think it’s gone into widespread use in Vietnam (or anywhere else for that matter). We think they’d better hurry up though, because if sea levels rise as projected, much of coastal Vietnam could be flooded. That definitely won’t be good for the rice. How much will be lost? We don’t know. Our observations tell us that the damage could be devastating- not just for Vietnam, but the other nations that import Vietnamese rice. Rice is one of those wonder crops- one that keeps a good portion of the impoverished world from starvation. Unfortunately, we’re not sure how much of Vietnam’s rice harvest is being exported, or where it’s being exported too. But we’re pretty confident in saying that the reverberations of a series of failed Vietnamese rice harvests would be felt throughout the stomachs of Asia.

Rice paddies on the coast of western Cat Ba Island. Many of Vietnam's rice paddies are located on low coastal plains in the east and south. Will a rise in the sea level cause failed harvests in the world's second largest exporter of rice?

THE UNITED STATES
All of this is pretty frightening stuff, and it’s really difficult to understand why we (the U.S.) haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and taken the lead in combating such climate change. It seems to be the type of thing we’d be good at. The battle will require ingenuity, creativity, hard work, and more than a few sacrifices- all of the qualities we’ve historically prided ourselves on. China is not going to lead the way. Neither is Russia. Europe is trying, but they can’t really do much until the U.S. signs on. The United States is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and no treaty, ban, or target can be met without our cooperation and active participation. Our travels have made it even more apparent to us that things must change very rapidly, and that the U.S. must stop ignoring the evidence and lead the way towards this change. Don’t believe us yet? Come over and see for yourselves. We’ll leave the light on for you.