The Hindu Business Line : Climate-change: The real Doomsday

The supreme danger staring the planet in the face is that the climate-change process may have become irreversible, and no matter what mankind chooses to do today it cannot prevent the development of a terrestrial climate totally inhospitable to the continuation of life as we know today.

Cut to a thousand years into the future, or maybe a thousand more. To an extra-terrestrial observer somewhere in the heavens, the sun and its planets remain the same physically — as they have been for some billions of years.

Only, there seems to have been a change in the colour composition of planet Earth, with the green and the blue and the white giving way to a more uniform rugged rocky, perhaps reddish, terrain. Lifeless (in human terms), the observer may choose to describe it — as has been the case with the other planets from time immemorial.

Getting back to 2007, February 3, the newspapers of the day have the following quote from the executive director of the UN Environment Fund: "It is critical that we look at this report (by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change)... as a moment where the focus of attention will shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity to what on earth are we going to do about it... The public should not sit back and say 'There's nothing we can do'. Anyone who would continue to risk inaction on the basis of the evidence presented here will one day in the history books be considered irresponsible."

The problem is that neither would there be any history books around when the climate apocalypse overtakes our planet, nor would there be any readers, interested or otherwise, because they all would have been wiped off the face of Earth by the predicted consequences of the very same processes that form the subject matter of the first instalment of the latest IPCC exercise (the product of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries).

No Laughing matter

To put it mildly, therefore, this is no laughing matter, in a manner of speaking. One, therefore, cannot but be awestruck at the suicidal myopia currently being exhibited by some people — the Americans, for instance — who are reportedly indulging in development politics vis-à-vis a phenomenon which is now almost certain to usher in doomsday for human civilisation much earlier than would have been the case if the mechanics of it were left to the inevitable chemical processes going on inside the sun and/or the inexorable gradual alterations in the earth's orbit in relation to the sun, among other things.

Reports emanating from Paris, where the IPCC document was released late last week, say that, in course of finalising the document, the US delegation, "led by political appointees, was pressing to play down language pointing to a link between intensification of hurricanes and warming caused by human activity."

Their objective, reportedly, was to highlight "uncertainties on certain issues," which would reduce the impact of any economic burden likely to result from a determination that the nations of the world had to take specific anti-climate change policies to safeguard the future of mankind.

Of course, the one thing good about this American policy is that it has been consistent with the 2001 stand adopted for the Kyoto protocol (not accepted by Washington), which is that the economic burden of reducing emissions into the atmosphere should be borne more equally (that is, less equitably) by the nations — including the rich and the developed on the one hand and the poor and the developing on the other — than what has been suggested by the Protocol.

Spaceship Earth

One is here reminded of the `Spaceship Earth' concept coined by Barbara Ward in 1966, the central theme of which is cooperation among both the rich and the poor (on the principle of `from each according to his ability') to save the planet from conflict and ultimate obliteration.

The problem today is that the economic structure of the world has changed beyond recognition since the time Ward projected her seminal concept which, among other things, has led to a hardening of positions mainly by the rich and industrialised countries principally because of the relative increase in the economic strength of what was previously known as the Third World.

The sentiment is understandable, but the fact remains that unless there is full cooperation on the climate-change front, all the economic growth put together will simply be of no use because there will be no one around to enjoy its fruits.

In fact, the supreme danger staring the planet in the face is that the climate-change process may have become irreversible, the inference being that no matter what mankind chooses to do today it cannot prevent the development of a terrestrial climate totally inhospitable to the continuation of life as we know of it today.

As with its other findings, the IPCC report is not categorical on this issue, but it does say that "Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised."

As Dr R. K. Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has said, the consequences of human activity is that "we are endangering all species on Earth, we are endangering the future of the human race," adding, "We are probably beyond the stage where we could have called it urgent. I would say it is immediate."

Putting the emerging crisis into a temporal frame, he is reported to have said: "What humans have done over the last couple of hundred years is unprecedented. It hasn't happened over tens of thousands of years."

All is not lost, yet

Nicholas Stern, in his report on the impact of climate change on economic development, gives one the strong impression that all is not lost as yet when he writes that the investment "that takes place in the next 10-20 years will have a profound effect on the climate in the second half of this century and in the next," adding, "our actions now and over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes."

Harping on the same theme as that of Ward, he says that "prompt and strong action is clearly warranted," and "because climate change is a global problem, the response to it must be international. It must be based on a shared vision of long-term goals and agreement on frameworks that will accelerate action over the next decade, and it must build on mutually reinforcing approaches at the national, regional and international level".

In fact, to some people, concerted action on this aspect of international cooperation is perhaps much more urgent than getting back to the negotiating table on the Doha Round.

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