Hurricane Titanic

Climate change will have severe consequences for India and the world, but the flipside is we can decisively shift the global debate

Cleo Paskal Ontario

With the recent climate talks in Nairobi and the release of the UK government’s massive Stern Review on the economic impacts of climate change, global warming is front and centre on the international agenda. At least in the West. In countries like India and China, addressing the problem is lower down the priority ladder, in part because there are suspicions that some of the policies proposed are, at best, hypocritical, and, at worst, designed to unfairly hobble developing economies. It’s a complicated and potentially dangerous situation, made worse by a long history of problematic relations between the West and the developing world. Understanding the best way forward, from an Indian point of view, requires breaking the issue down into its component parts.

Does climate change exist? There is now no scientific doubt that the climate is changing. Globally, 20 of the 21 hottest years since 1860 were in the past 25 years. In 2005 alone, England, France, Spain and Portugal received less than half their normal rainfall. Severe drought in southern Brazil ravaged corn and soybean crops. A series of rainstorms in China killed 170 people and affected about 21 million more. The Atlantic hurricane season featured a record breaking 26 tropical storms, 14 of them hurricanes (the average is 10 named storms and six hurricanes).

Typhoon Nabi dumped an unprecedented 1,321 mm of rain on Japan, causing extensive damage. Tropical cyclone Ingrid achieved a first by being the only cyclone so far to reach intensity Category 5 off three different Australian states. In Canada, 2005 was the wettest year on record, and heavy flooding in southern Alberta proved to be the most expensive natural disaster in the province’s history. And in India, the monsoon dumped a record amount of rain in the west and south, killing over 1,800 people and affecting 20 million more. Mumbai alone was hit with 944 mm in a single day, the most on record.

Are these disasters man-made? The climate is constantly shifting and, historically, there have been large temperature shifts unrelated to human activity (the vast majority took place before there were humans); but, this time, it seems we are at least partially at fault. Dr RK Pachauri, from Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), in Delhi, is the chairman of a major UN study comprising thousands of scientific papers on climate change, coordinated by over 2,000 specialists from around the world. Pachauri has stated there is “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities”.

According to the studies, the changes are the results of the build-up of greenhouse gases (that is, from car exhaust and industries) in the atmosphere. There is a clear link between the amount of greenhouse gases and the severity of climate shift. Says Pachauri, “The severity of the adverse impacts will be larger for greater cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases and changes in climate”.