‘We Are handed towards disaster if we can’t get our warming in check’-Alice C.Hill,CFR Senior for energy and environment.
Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. The planet Earth, a majestic 4.54 billion years old, was once covered in verdant green, but the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations finds the earth has now lost one-third of its forest through human activities.
WWF estimates such land use changes have caused wildlife decline by 69 per cent in the last five decades. The UN finds 75 per cent of the earth’s land is degraded while its oceans are 30 per cent more acidic now, choked by plastic and chemical waste.
The former American vice president and Nobel Laureate Al Gore in his famous book entitled The Future has pointed out multiple threats confronting Planet Earth: erosion of fertile land at unsustainable rates each inch of topsoil lost diminishes grain yields by around 6 per cent; increasing desertification of grasslands; a slowing rate of agricultural productivity since the Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century, the loss of a significant amount of the world’s remaining plant genetic diversity as much as three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have been already lost; erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns are associated with global warming vis- à-vis climate change which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deeper drought, and the looming impact of catastrophic heat stress on important food crops threatening the ability of the world to expand food supplies.
Global warming vis-à-vis climate change is a slow-moving crisis. To be more precise, it is a very fast-moving crisis from the perspective of geological epochs, but very slow from the point of view of daily events. And also from the political calendar. No doubt, if the climate change crisis were going to culminate in a single event in a year’s time, humanity would get itself organised to prevent the crisis or adapt to it. Yet the climate changes underway will play out over decades, not months.
The situation is a bit like the proverbial frog that is put in water that is very slowly heated. The story has it that a frog in gradually warming water will never jump out and eventually be boiled alive. Perhaps humanity will be the same.
Global warming is literally the biggest story unfolding on earth today. As the earth continues to spiral into a climate crisis, we are trapped into a hotter, much hotter planet. In India, January 2024 was the warmest on record since 1850, with global surface temperature 1.270C above the 20th century average of 12.20C, as per the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This apart, the month was also the second wettest recorded and in terms of sea ice at the poles, Antarctica sea ice extent was the fourth-lowest on record during the month. January’s warming records are indeed a continuum of trends being seen since June 2023, possibly due to the strong influence of El Nino.
Indeed, we all now share a battery of ‘highest evers’ the highest atmospheric CO2, the densest methane, the greatest plastic pollution and the sharpest losses of biodiversity. The World Economic Forum finds global CO2 emissions rose in 2022 to a record high. Such CO2 along with other Greenhouse gases (GHGs) cover earth in a sheath that does not let it release heat into space, trapping this in the atmosphere instead making earth 1.11 degrees warmer. In the 15th century, the prescient Shakespeare wrote: “And through this distemperature, we see that seasons alter…” Indeed, changes of temperatures are causing sudden deluges and droughts, searing heat waves and igniting forests and fevering the earth more.
In the words of Al Gore: “Erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns associated with global warming which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deep deeper drought.” In July 2023, heatwaves raged across Europe, floods hit China, rain triggered landslides in India and wildfires even swept through Hawaii’s golden beaches and lush forests.
Such physical manifestations are one part of the climate-change epic. The other is social impacts. The World Health Organisation (WHO) states climate change is the biggest health threat facing humanity, poised to take 2,50,000 lives annually between 2030 and 2050 through heat stress, malaria and malnourishment. As vectors emerge from wrecked forests and floods, diseases spread while, with warmer climes, heat strokes are claiming lives worldwide, also intensifying cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses and strokes. Studies have found that mosquitoes pick up the virus more readily in higher temperatures. Higher temperatures also increase the likelihood of transmission, so the hotter it is outside, the more likely a mosquito that bites an infected bird will carry the virus and the more likely it will pass it along to an unwitting human host.
As the climate warms, more vectors are being enabled to inhabit areas we did not think they could in the first place.
Hence, there are far more vector-borne diseases now, including Zika virus and Lyme disease which has spread from specific regions to across the US now. India has dengue and malaria which will increase with greater flooding risks. For any individ- ual, these conditions are very dangerous as they could get exposed to a number of these climate change -linked risks.
Both heat and smoke do have systematic impacts on the immune system. These can be very deleterious studies have found, for instance, that people who get exposed to heat stress
or air pollution have less likelihood of even having a good vaccine response which impairs
their ability to fight off further illnesses.
Extreme heat, storms or droughts can wipe out farmlands which causes heightened food insecurity. As temperatures continue to increase, corn (maize) the most widely grown crop in the world appears to be the most vulnerable to heat stress. Corn yields start to decrease at a range of temperatures the earth is already experiencing regularly in summer months. Every day during the growing season (roughly from March to August) that temperatures climb above a threshold of 840F, corn yields drop by 0.7 per cent. According to some studies, each degree increase in night temperatures corresponds with a linear decrease in wheat yields.
One of the leaders of an Asian international agricultural research group, Promod K. Agar- wal, said, “Warmer conditions and longer dry seasons linked to climate change could prove to be the perfect catalyst for the outbreaks of pests and diseases. They are already formidable enemies affecting food crops.” Higher temperatures are leading to a dramatic expansion in the range of insects harmful to food crops, sending them farther north in the northern hemisphere and farther south in the southern hemisphere, and to higher altitudes.
(The writer is retired, IAS officer)