A vivid climate warning shot across India’s bow
PremiumThe IPCC’s latest report offers grim scenarios of what awaits Indian city dwellers if the world fails to arrest climate change. The global response to the crisis is in need of quantum leaps
We are all frogs," said an odd placard held up once by a climate activist. It was presumably a reference to the ‘boiling frog syndrome’, lulled as many of us might be into ignorance of what awaits the planet as it slowly heats up, except that we do not have the option of leaping out of danger. A grim fate may yet be averted, though, thanks to awareness generated by periodic alarms raised by reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The latest of these warnings, the second part of its sixth assessment, was served on Monday. The first, last August, was on climate science. This one is about our vulnerability and adaptation to global warming. Covid came in the way of its scheduled release last September, but the broad threats we face has already been laid out. Global temperatures are 1.1-1.3° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, this has begun to cause havoc across the world, and going above 1.5°C would be far worse than the decimal difference may suggest—as that could be a tipping point. The worry is that we may surpass that mark by mid-century. Some 3 billion people would be exposed to its harshest effects, warns the report, a large proportion in India. What’s new this time are various region-specific scenarios outlined by the IPCC report. Indian urban dwellers, in particular, may be among the worst hit by the heat trapped on earth by the pollutants we humans spouts.
Apart from coastal cities, urban clusters that span the sub-Himalayan plains from Punjab to our north-eastern states would be the most severely impacted, should emissions stay on their current trajectory. In the direct line of danger would lie cities like Lucknow and Patna, which might reach ‘wet-bulb’ temperatures of 35°C towards the end of this century, with Chennai, Mumbai, Indore and others not faring much better. Again, projections on the mercury scale do not convey how insufferable that sort of climate could be. Wet-bulb heat involves humidity so high that perspiration would fail to evaporate and cool our bodies down. As of now, most parts of India experience wet-bulb heat of 25-30°C at most. Without the natural thermostat of sweat glands offering relief, humans are usually unable to withstand 35°C for more than six hours at a stretch. Those who live along sea coasts, meanwhile, would have visibly rising water levels to contend with. Even if governments fulfil their carbon reduction pledges, global sea levels will likely rise 44-76cm this century as polar ice melts, though quicker reductions could cap this at 28-55cm. Here too, what we visualize would only be a deceptive version of the actual threat. All these are estimates, with multiple input variables that may or may not behave as expected. Yet, even allowing for gaps, all climate modelling points to a bleak future. For our species, food cultivation could get difficult (rice and maize alerts have been sounded for India). For many others, survival itself would get fraught. Many rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands and high-altitude ecosystems stare at not-too-distant extinction.
For those who have hopes pinned on human ingenuity, the IPCC report has an ego-deflator. Global efforts in adapting to climate change are falling short of its momentum. Arresting and reversing emissions, thus, is the only way out. Despite the stepped-up avowals of last year’s CoP-26 summit, the global response needs quantum leaps. Else, radical ideas like ‘solar geo-engineering’ will probably gain appeal.
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