Hiranmay Karlekar
Like the unseasonal rains that ruined crops across northern India, the heat wave currently sweeping large parts of the country underlines the disastrous effects of global warming on human life. But then this is only the beginning. The impact of climate change will become much more severe over the years. The United States-based Council on Foreign Relations’ Issue Brief entitled, The Global Climate Change Regime, cites the American Meteorological Society as saying that there was a 90 per cent probability of global temperatures rising by 3.5 to 7.4 degrees Celsius in less than a hundred years, with even greater increases over land and the poles. The result of the shifts would be widespread disasters in the form of rising sea levels, violent and volatile weather patterns, desertification, famine, water shortages, and other secondary effects including conflict.
Paul R Ehrlich and Anne H Ehrlich mention other consequences and point out in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, “Destabilisation of the climate can undermine biodiversity, exterminating populations and species that cannot adapt or move fast enough to keep up with changing habitats, including species that may play important roles in support of agriculture. Ecosystems may be torn apart as species migrate at different rates and in response to differing changes.”
Significantly, it is not just recently that temperatures have been rising. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.” It goes on to add, “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere…”
Nor are the two fundamental causes of global warming unknown – increasing emission of greenhouse gases and depletion of the world’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon as a result of deforestation and the disappearance of grasslands. Nor is it unknown that humans produce greenhouse gases by burning coal, oil, and natural gas to generate energy for power, heat, industry, and transportation. Unfortunately, according to another IPCC report, despite efforts to contain it, the emission of greenhouse gases increased worldwide at the rate of 1.3 per cent annually from 1970 to 2000 and leapt to 2.2 per cent a year from 2000 to 2010.
Nor are the specific causes of the various types of disasters unknown. According to a paper by Douglas J McCauley in Science magazine, excessive human consumption and habitat loss are among the causes of the unprecedented damage being done to oceans and marine life. Carl Zimmer’s piece in his column, ‘Matter’, in The New York Times, published some months ago, which points this out, adds that fish farms are destroying mangroves; bottom trawlers, scraping ocean floors with their nets, have already affected 20,000 square miles and reduced tracts of continental shelves to rubble. The effect of destroying continental shelves will be severe. They teem with life because sunlight can penetrate their shallow waters and not the depths of oceans,
Seabed mining threatens to destroy unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea. Contracts covering 4,60,000 square miles – against zero in 2000 – have been signed. There are also incidental damages. While the continuing ban on whaling is most laudable, the growing number of container ships is killing whales through accidents. Increasing carbon emission is making sea water acidic and hence inhospitable to marine life. Global warming, Zimmer’s piece cited above states, has caused a 40 per cent decline in coral reefs besides leading to the migration of some fish to cooler waters. Not all breeds may not be lucky enough to be able to do so.
Fortunately, according to McCauley and his team, as cited by Zimmer, the oceans are still intact and wild enough to bounce back to health given timely measures. This, it is not difficult to imagine, will have to include restricting the establishment of fish farms, the plying of bottom trawler and sea-bed mining. Simultaneously, one must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by switching from fossil fuel-based power to alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear, solar, and wind, and achieving greater energy efficiency by developing new technologies and modifying daily human behaviour so that each person produces a smaller carbon footprint. All such measures, however, require large funds, and the still lingering global financial crisis has placed a huge question mark against their availability.
Even otherwise, there has been insufficient progress on the ground. The limited Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas remains comatose; the Copenhagen meeting of 2009 produced little. The historic accord in Lima, Peru, on December 14 last year, doubtless saw the representatives of the nearly 200 participating nations committing their respective countries to reducing fossil fuel emissions by 31st March this year and drawing up plans detailing how much emission each would cut by 2020, and the domestic policies it would follow to that end. It further stipulated that those failing to keep the deadline would have to produce their plans by June.
The Lima Accord, as the agreement is called, however, lacks legal sanction; nor does it bind countries to reducing emissions to a particular level. It depends on countries honouring their commitments, which may not happen in all cases. But even if the Lima Accord is fully implemented, the most fundamental cause of global warming, increase in human activity, will continue to grow unless its basic cause, the alarming population rise worldwide, is addressed. According to a UN report in June 2013 the world’s population is set to rise from 7.2 billion then to 8.1 billion in 2025 and 9.6 billion in 2050. India’s population, estimated at 1.2 billion in 2015, is scheduled to rise to 1.3 to 1.6 billion by 2025 and 2050 respectively.
