AngelaI was one of those who honestly held little to almost no interest in climate changes or global warming. Sure I’ll turn off the lights and fans when I don’t use them, but I still prefer driving a car to taking public transport. After all, if eating broccoli (the supposedly healthiest vegetables in the world) can lead to high risk of stroke, how many things on Earth are considered non-hazardous? So I decided to accept global warming and the increasing natural disasters as a fact of life, fullstop.
Until recently, when I chanced upon that big countries such as India and China are at the risk of vanishing off the face of the earth because of global warming and something called “storm surge”, did it perk my interest of understanding why they must all go down the water.
One of the cities that is at risk of disappearing: Mumbai, India
Shanghai, China. Can you imagine China without its largest city?
One of the most beautiful places on earth, Tokyo isn’t spared either.
You’ve heard about the tsunami and the earthquake that (almost) crippled some of our good Asian buddies. Now, there’s an additional giant that has joined the human wipeout quest – the storm surge, or in layman’s term, the storm tide that is directly raising the sea level.
Studies have found that by the next generation, storm surge will become a huge issue that cost the world over trillions of dollars. The potential number of people losing their lives in Asia alone surpasses that of the total death toll in World War II, not to mention, these alluring cities will eventually submerge underwater by coastal floods.
Storm Surge in a nutshell
Everyone knows what global warming is, but storm surge?
It is basically when the strength of the hurricanes and the typhoons pushes the water, causing them to overlap and pile up the sea, making the sea level higher than usual, which, in serious cases, may lead to flooding known as coastal flooding.
Image credits: chathamemergency
Storm surges that happen together with high tide is like Charmander in Pokemon going wrong and evolving straight into Charizard – the impact is much greater and causes unimaginable damage.
So areas with a significant difference between low tide and high tide are especially dangerous to stay in, especially when storm surges are happening ten times more frequently than the past. The water level can reach as high as 10m if the storm surge happened with the high tide.
In short, plan your trips, and maybe for your grandchildren’s as well. It’s literally a race against time.
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