Climate changes

THE SCENARIO PROJECTED by the U.N. Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change during the present century is a lot more than being just gloomy. It is alarming since what awaits us is a steady intensification of global warming for the tropical and developing countries and storms and rising sea levels for the richer countries as well on the Florida and the Atlantic Coast. If, as Mr. James A. McCarthy, environmental scientist of the Harvard University, has said, ``Most of the Earth's people will be on the losing side'', it sounds very much like a forecast of doom. Apart from its being very frightening, it should also bewilder many who might have taken it for granted that the dizzy pace taken by science and technology during the last century would spread greater prosperity and a happier and healthier world.

What has gone wrong? The kind of progress towards which science and technology were geared should provide the answer. While accelerating industrialisation, neither the West where it had begun with the Industrial Revolution in England two centuries ago nor the late comers in the rest of the world in the post-colonial era had cared to go about it with the imagination required to safeguard the generations unborn from the toxicity they were going to be exposed to.

The warning to the rapidly industrialising West about where it was heading did come very early and there was enough time to act upon it with corrective steps. The smoke and fumes from the mushrooming factories were trapped in a sky over which there was almost always an overhang of clouds except during unusually bright summers. This inevitably led to the stifling atmospheric inversion from the spewing out of more and more carbon dioxide. The heights which the growing volumes of toxic gases from an industrialising Earth were reaching were beginning to tear away the protective ozone layer to expose the planet to global warming from the unshielded rays of the blazing sun. While the new entrants into industrialisation in the tropical countries had earlier lived under a warmer sun dispersing or dissolving the cloud cover, the same trail they took as the West quickly led to the blackening of the sky with the destruction of the forests and the release of the carbon dioxide stored in their trees.

If the baking of the Earth is not stopped, it will eventually make it uninhabitable and wholly devoid of life like the other planets of the solar system. A great deal is indeed known about how this could be stopped and it is only a question of the nations of the world mustering the will to ensure the greening of the Earth. (It is, incidentally, ironic that the word ``greenhouse'' refers to the warming of the Earth while it should be throwing up an inviting image of luxuriant greenery.) What is needed is the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations spelt out in the Treaty of U.N. Framework Convention of 1994 to which 165 countries were signatories and which have been ratified by almost all their Governments. The stabilisation on which there has been a consensus is aimed at preventing dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system. But the levels at which the emissions should be contained are not specifically stated and there is only a vague emphasis against the concentrations becoming dangerous. This could reflect an unwillingness of the developed countries to accept responsibility for the checking of greenhouse gas emissions. The multinational corporations from the richer countries are also projecting a deceptive concern for the industrialisation of the developing countries with offers to set up production units for them while their real objective is the shifting of polluting technology away from their own shores. The developing countries, therefore, should be on guard against the intrusion of a new brand of anti-ecological colonialism.

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Section  : Opinion
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