Teach young people small steps to ease climate change: KS Hosalikar

"When I was young, cold mornings were more frequent. Today, winters are shorter. What used to be measured in months is now counted in days. Unseasonal rain was not as common as it is now," KS Hosalikar, deputy director general of the India Meteorological Department, said on Thursday.

He was speaking at the Nehru Science Centre in Worli after inaugurating 'Planet Under Pressure', a travelling exhibition that warns about the serious consequences of climate change and proposes steps to mitigate the problem.

Hosalikar remembered the foggy mornings during his childhood days, when the weather was simpler. But he pointed out that attributing certain recent instances to climate change could be misleading.

"In the past decade we have seen a lot of extreme events such as cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, floods in Rajasthan, and the hail in Maharashtra this year. But more assessment of the weather changes are required before we say they are due to climate change," said Hosalikar. This is also because India lies in the tropical belt that has such variations in climate which could be the reason for the abrupt weather changes.

'Planet Under Pressure' focuses on three elements, namely the rise in temperature, sea level rise and the increased frequency of abnormal or extreme weather events through infographics, multimedia and interactive models, created specially for the younger generation.

The exhibition has been prepared by the Nehru Science Centre and will be conducted together with the National Council of Science Museums.

Climate change is a major global concern, but few countries have taken any concrete steps to reduce the intensity of the consequences.

The fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has emphasized human interference as the biggest cause for the global rise in temperature in the past five decades.

Experts have indicated that at the rate at which the climate is changing the changes that may have occurred in the course of a century could happen in half the time.

"It is the children of today who will experience these changes in their lifetime and it is most important to create an understanding among them to take steps, if even small, in the right direction," Hosalikar said.