Well the typical post-disaster killers (cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, tetanus)  are quite stark to drowning. Its doubtful however that the infrastructure and willpower exists however to count and sort heads.

People are going to get sick -- seriously sick, if aid is not forthcoming. However as I've noted before, humans are fairly tough to kill. The weak have already died from the storm surge via drowning/debris impact. For the survivors, as long as they can obtain food, they have a decent chance at rebuilding on their own.

Its not as if the people of the Hawaiian Islands (for example) had never been hit by a hurricane and had to rebuild. Could a lot of suffering be averted if aid workers were brought on the scene? Absolutely. However is the lack of aid going to result in mass casualties as implied by the Sun? I doubt it.

Have to agree with Mayorbob re: the Burmese government though, they seem awfully Evil; charitably I'd like to call them clueless, but its hard for me to think that rational people don't realize the challenge thats facing them. Instead I suspect that the culture has become so used to central command authority (which is itself currently paralyzed) that noone knows what to do.
 

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

I'm not even sure it's an answer that can be answered. Rather than try to even guesstimate the numbers who died in the initial storm surge apart from those who died after the initial attempts to deliver relief supplies, the only thing that matters to me is the unbelievable evil (yes that's an appropriate term here) and inept manner the Burmese government has dealt with this disaster. They've impounded all incoming supplies and refused to allow foreign technicians or medical staff to enter the country. Along with the tons of supplies, the UN and private relief agencies have delivered temporary warehousing facilities to store the food and medicines to allow for orderly distribution. Yet the Burmese government insists only Burmese will be distributing anything. The thing is, unless the food and medicine is stored properly they will spoil. The foreign technicians could erect those temporary warehouses in hours. Burmese, with no knowledge of how to do this, will likely take days or weeks to figure it all out and, by then, what they've impounded will probably be spoiled. Seeing as how the only thing the Burmese government has shown any particular skill at doing up till now is beating or killing a bunch of Buddhist monks, it's not likely that they'll be able to craft a distribution network to get supplies in the hands of those who need it anytime soon. Added to all the misery that nature has delivered, the government has ordered refugees out of shelters and back to their devastated villages so they can vote in a referendum on some sort of constitutional reform this weekend.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

You make a good point and given that death tolls  from cyclones and tsunamis in that part of the world have always been remarkably low, there's no reason to assume that what we're seeing in Burma is just more of the tired old exaggeration.

remember when the amazon was supposed to have been chopped down by now?

No, I don't.  Do you?  I have read* where deforestation has been a serious and growing problem in that region.  However, I don't remember any sort of report saying that the forest will be chopped down by May 7, 2008.

*Of course, I know of this stuff only through the media.  Until I can put boots on the ground and whip out the old tape measure, I won't really know for sure.

WWGE: Who Would Gordon Enslave?

Wetkarma is right.  Generally, most early estimates for disasters are off.

I recall initial possible death toll estimate for 9/11 the day after being much higher, possibly 3x higher than the final death toll.

There was also an earthquake in 1999, either in Turkey or Egypt, I forget which, where the government didn't want to officially lower the death toll even after realizing that the actual death toll was half the initial estimate because they were afraid they wouldn't receive as much international help with a lower death toll.

Except the latest data is showing that the past few months have been cooler than normal

Wrong.  But more to the point the northern part of the Indian ocean is cooler than normal, so attributing this particular storm to global warming is just plain wrong.  Or, to put it more precisely, global warming made the storm more likely, but a local cool temperature anomaly at the time it formed made it less likely than normal.  More to the point, it was only a minimal category 4 storm, which is not an exceptionally big storm.

The geography in this region has a lot of very flat big river flood plains, which make the area extremely susceptible to storm surges.

If there are deaths approaching a million from this storm, it's going to be from famine caused by the storm and not by deaths directly caused by the storm.

Except the latest data is showing that the past few months have been cooler than normal - to the point where some people are predicting a natural 'global cooling' before the man-made warming overrides it. [its all very confusing I know]

If I remember Al's documentary correctly, global warming does not necessarily mean that the local weather will be consistently warmer (and hence the reason why people's anecdotal evidence about "it's such a warm winter day... gosh, that global warming" has no bearing).  

Instead, the most reliable factor of whether global warming is occurring over the long term is by studying glaciers.

But I do agree with you overall that Al's speedy reaction to capitalize marketing about global warming from this event is not necessarily helpful to the cause of deterring global warming.

If it weren't for all those corporate-funded 6-year-old girl denialists, we would have ended the butterfly menace years ago.