dna edit: Their prophecy, our future

The United Nations climate panel seems condemned to the same inescapable fate as Cassandra of Greek mythology was. It has the power of prophecy, and the curse of never being believed. For close to 25 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been documenting climate change and predicting the consequences of insatiable human over-consumption and reckless depredation of the environment. Except for scientists and activists in the know and understanding of things, the prophecies have been unfailingly falling on deaf ears.

Governments either don’t grasp the enormity of the situation, or are both callous and lethargic to act. Industries are either trenchant deniers or are too busy making today’s money to be bothered about tomorrow’s ineluctable disaster. And the people today are as blissfully ignorant as they were a quarter of a century ago. This is not about fiddling while the city burns; this is about being in a state of oblivion when the end of the world is nigh. Politicians and corporates are in a daze because they remain drugged on power and greed. But if the 2,600-page document produced by the IPCC on Monday can’t jolt governments and corporates out of their stupor, nothing ever can.

This, the fifth report in the series, is far more in-depth, catalogued and prophetic than the earlier ones. One of the many unnerving reasons for this is that the IPCC has meticulously documented and analysed the effects of climate change since the time the panel brought its first report in 1990. In other words, it’s not of making hypotheses about what will happen 100 years from now — it is already happening, and the impacts are widespread, stark and calamitous. The IPCC has found the strongest evidence of climate change in the thawing permafrost in the Arctic, and in the destruction of coral reefs. Climate change is tell-tale in human systems. It is already hitting crop yields, and dictating conflicts and migration. It is exacerbating poverty, and driving heatwaves and droughts.

The summary of the report alone has mentioned the word “risk” as many as 230 times; the 2007 report had a mere 40 mentions. The risk factor is extremely pronounced for us Indians, and scary too. The Himalayan river basins will be under severe stress and may cause conflicts; coastal flooding will be destructive and affect beach tourism in Goa and Kerala; foodgrain production will drop; Mumbai and Kolkata may go under water in less than 100 years; extreme weather events like the Uttarakhand flash floods and Cyclone Phailin will become more striking and common. These warnings are based on trends, and the trends themselves are portentous.

It would be bird-brained of one not to foresee the consequences if the human-made causes of these trends go unchecked. Indian environmentalists have been warning on these counts for years, but they haven’t had a bearing on official policies. Evidence lies in the myopic vision statements recently issued by political parties in the form of vacuous election manifestos. They probably have no clue what climate change means or portends. If we let such demagogues rule us, then we deserve to be doomed.