Blog from Bolivia: Evo Asks a Good Question on Climate Change

Blog from Bolivia: Evo Asks a Good Question on Climate Change: "Monday, February 26, 2007
Evo Asks a Good Question on Climate Change
You could call it Bolivia's Katrina (though with a far more active national government than the one that so terribly botched relief to New Orleans). Whole sections of the country are under water. Thousands are displaced. A huge effort is required to save lives and an even bigger one will be needed to address the economic damage left in the floods wake.

In the midst of the Bolivian relief effort, Bolivia's President, Evo Morales, asked a reasonable set of questions this weekend. What role does global climate change have in Bolivia's massive weather disaster? Who caused this problem? Who bears its brunt? And what will the world do to address it, in all of its consequences both environmental and economic?

I will leave it to climate experts to debate whether the current Bolivian catastrophe is a genuine product of global climate change or just a run-of-the-mill El Nino disaster that would have happened anyway. If Bolivia can't hang the massive floods in its tropics and eastern lowlands on climate change, it can certainly point to other impacts, including the prediction by climatologists that the country's ancient glaciers, remnants of the ice age, may be melted off within 30 to 40 years.

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