The Hindu : Blowing hot and cold

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 25, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Blowing hot and cold

A GREAT MANY people, including the young, the old and the infirm, have only the most rudimentary sort of protection against the intense and prolonged cold wave that north India is currently in the grip of. At such times, it is hard to accept or understand why global warming is a cause for concern. Nevertheless, as summer temperatures in large parts of the Subcontinent threaten to touch 48 or even 50 degrees in the near future, those who are more exposed to the elements will have to cope with even larger variations of temperature each year. Mired in poverty, they cannot even dream of living at a comfortable and constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit all their lives long, no matter how cold or hot it gets outside.

There is also a more intimate link between cold waves and global warming. It is not warmer weather that Europeans are averse to. What frightens them is the prospect of being frozen stiff. They do have concerns about other `extreme weather events' that global warming will bring in its wake: such as hurricanes, the massive floods that swept through Europe a few months ago, and the severe and prolonged drought that presently has Australia by the throat. Or at any rate would have had such concerns if the war on terrorism had not swept all other concerns aside. For, the increased intensity and unpredictability of such disasters are part and parcel of the effects that global warming brings in its trail. But strange as it might seem, towering above all such fears is the fear of being frozen stiff by global warming.

To some extent, this fear is based on the effect of global warming on polar ice caps, which will cool higher latitudes to begin with (while drowning lower altitudes). But the main reason is that even small and seemingly trivial changes triggered by global warming could disrupt the Gulf Stream which today serves as a sort of central heating system for northwestern Europe and the British Isles. Starting from the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, the Stream loses a great deal of water through evaporation as it heads northeast towards colder waters. This makes the water more salty — and more heavy, because of which it sinks in the cold waters of the north (to be precise northeastern) Atlantic Ocean, forming a deep ocean undercurrent that acts as a pulling mechanism for the Gulf Stream, and preserves its intensity and direction. Even a relatively small jerk to this delicate mechanism could turn it off — thereby reducing northwestern Europe to a cold uninhabitable wasteland. Like the Labrador Peninsula, which lies between the same latitudes on the western shores of the Atlantic. Happily, no such catastrophe looms over the North American continent, where major settlements do not extend nearly as far north as they do in Europe. It is because of this that the U.S. President, George W. Bush, is able to view global warming with cheerful unconcern even though the U.S. is by far the largest contributor. Unlike Europe, the U.S. probably has more to gain than to lose.

One important point that comes out of all this is that global warming will affect different regions differently. Keeping this in mind, the 2001 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dutifully deals with each of the major and even minor regions of the world separately, in a section of its own. But as in the case of the IMF, the World Trade Organisation and the present-day United Nations, it is the upper middle latitudes that get the most careful attention. Like others outside this charmed circle, India would do well to work out for itself what global warming has in store for us. In particular, we should not take at face value a country which habitually speaks of comfort levels in one language (68 degrees Fahrenheit) while calculating them in another (20 degrees centigrade).

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