Where warming hits home

Only a few years ago, water from the local pond was fresh and sweet on Samit Biswas' tongue. It quenched his family's thirst and cleansed their bodies.

But drinking a cupful now leaves a briny flavor in his mouth. Tiny white crystals sprout on Biswas' skin after he bathes and in his clothes after his wife washes them.

The change, international scientists say, is the result of intensified flooding caused by shifting climate patterns. Warmer weather and rising oceans are sending seawater surging up Bangladesh's rivers in greater volume and frequency, experts say, overflowing and seeping into the soil and water supply of thousands of people.

Their lives are being squeezed by distant lands they have seen only on television -- America, China and Russia at the top of the list -- whose carbon emissions are pushing temperatures and sea levels upward. This month, a long-awaited report by the United Nations said global warming fueled by human activity could lift temperatures by 8 degrees and the ocean's surface by 23 inches by 2100.

Here in southwestern Bangladesh, the bleak future forecast by the report is already becoming reality, bringing misery along with it.

The heavier than usual floods have wiped out homes and paddy fields. They have increased the salinity of the water, which is contaminating wells, killing trees and slowly poisoning the mangrove jungle that forms a barrier against the Bay of Bengal.

If sea levels continue to rise at their present rate, by the time Biswas, 35, retires from his job as a teacher, the only home he has known will be swamped, overrun by the ocean with the force of an unstoppable army. That, in turn, will trigger another kind of flood: millions of displaced residents desperate for a place to live.

"It will be a disaster," Biswas said.

Bangladesh, a densely crowded and painfully poor nation, contributes only a minuscule amount to the greenhouse gases slowly smothering the planet. But a combination of geography and demography puts it among the countries experts predict will be hit hardest as Earth heats up.

Nearly 150 million people, the equivalent of about half the U.S. population, live packed in an area the size of Iowa and about as flat. Home to where the mighty Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna rivers meet, most of Bangladesh is a vast delta of alluvial plains that are barely above sea level, making it prone to flooding from waterways swollen by rain, snowmelt from the Himalayas and increased infiltration of the ocean.