Just how much bizarre climate change news can one handle in a week? This has been a strange week on that count. As this was being written, Bengaluru, Chennai, and huge parts of Tamil Nadu were reeling under record-breaking rains, making some apartment folk park their cars on flyovers and ride boats, Venice-like.
For someone like me, who grew up learning Tamil Nadu mostly received only the retreating northeast monsoons in October and November, there are new lessons. The southwest monsoon that covers most of India now plasters the better part of TN as well. Crops ready to be harvested in more than 6,000 acres of prized Cauvery delta area in Thanjavur district have been submerged in floods. Dams are overflowing.
No one is talking of Karnataka not releasing water from the river notorious for disputes between the two states. I have childhood memories of people from TN’s Ramanathapuram and Salem landing up in Delhi for work because of drought.
Now, contrast that with news from the Garhwal Himalayas up north. The Roopkund Lake, a trekker’s favourite at 16,500 feet above sea level, is said to be shrinking. The ‘lake of skeletons’ is as well known for its beauty as for the presence of human remains that show up when the snow melts. The origins of the skeletons remain a puzzle for historians, but there appears to be little mystery in what might have caused the lake to shrink.
Southwest of the Himalayas, India’s driest region in the plains, Western Rajasthan, has been receiving excess rainfall. The Met department says West Rajasthan has had excess monsoons for six years in a row. There was a flood-like situation in Jaisalmer two months ago. That’s unusual for a town famous for its desert.
If you want a clincher on climate change, try the Sahara for size. For the first time in 50 years, the Sahara desert in northwest Africa has seen severe floods. The remote desert town of Tagounite in Morocco received 100mm of rain in one day, more than what the entire region receives in a year.
Now, who should we believe? Scientists, storytellers or mystics who see a divine hand in all things natural? The climate change clock has been ticking for a while now and global leaders have been only having carbon footprint jamborees, with little progress on reducing emissions.
Storytellers may point to changing fortunes of life and living. Rain may make the poor rich or the rich poor, making us recall R K Narayan’s ironic words about the god of harvest, whose “bounty was as unacceptable as his parsimony”. Perhaps there are farmers rejoicing in arid regions after heavy rain, even as others shed tears to replace rain that did not fall from their skies.
As a lover of poetic justice, I would like to see good folk rewarded and evil folk punished, but I see no evidence of such divine justice, though there is evidence of a reverse swing in weather conditions.
Climate historians have an I-told-you-so attitude different from storytellers or contemporary scientists. Geologists have classified the last 4,200 years as the 'Meghalayan Age’ marked by the onset of a mega-drought that ruined civilisations such as the Indus Valley or Mesopotamia. The desert talk stands in contrast to India’s own Meghalaya state, home to Mawsynram, the wettest place on Earth. But the geological tag on climate history is derived from stalagmites found in Meghalaya.
I’m slightly confused that we are seeing heavy desert rains even as we speak of an earthly epoch marked by droughts. I shall leave the nuances of long-term weather vagaries to scientists. I would, however, like to bring in the so-called Gaia hypothesis, a bit of a half-scientific theory that holds that the Earth’s climate and other conditions are regulated by a self-regulating system linked to issues like climate change.
The optimistic view is this self-regulation leads to the best conditions for life to exist. However, the theory is not supported by sufficient data and is sometimes dismissed as wishful thinking.
Whatever the contours of debates between scientists, this much can be said: latter-day climate change is being ignored by policymakers worldwide, and it is not a pleasant feeling.
Italian-American Mariana Mazzucato, a cutting-edge economist who teaches in London, wrote over a decade ago that the green industry will not develop ‘naturally’ through market forces not only because of energy infrastructure issues but also due to “a failure of markets to value sustainability or punish waste and pollution”. Prophetic words! Private sector activity can never be a substitute for trendsetting action by governments when it concerns phenomena such as climate change.
In the absence of any evidence of poetic or divine justice, we have to rely on local gods, also known as policy-makers. They have to do some reverse-swinging to combat adverse climate change.
The 29th Conference of the Parties (COP 29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is due to take place at Baku in Azerbaijan from November 11. Mercifully, the agenda includes mobilisation of finances to limit global warming and help adapt to climate change.
Money shapes human behaviour. With proper financial signals, entrepreneurs may embrace climate change as a supply opportunity rather than an existential threat. We can only hope the forthcoming COP won’t be a cop-out. It is raining divine signals and it is time for state action.
Madhavan Narayanan
Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)
