Climate issues are hotting up. Literally. Floods and scorching heat was the lot of the under-developed world. The Brahmaputra bursting its banks and flooding villages in lower Assam happens with sickening regularity in the monsoons. China’s key cites like Beijing and Shanghai are facing hotter and longer summers, and wetter rain months.
But now climate is coming to haunt the developed world too. In the last few weeks, Canada and the US’ Pacific-rim states have seen record, scorching temperatures and hundreds of deaths. Lytton, British Columbia, touched 49.6 °C in June end, a new record; temperatures you would associate with Sawai Madhavpur in Rajasthan. Vancouver police records show over 130 deaths on account of the heat wave. Canada’s previous highest has been 45 °C.
US President Joe Biden admitted the heat wave was the result of climate change. The phenomenon of searing heat conditions over western parts of Canada and the US has been caused by a dome of static high-pressure hot air stretching from California to the Arctic territories.
Meanwhile, western Europe is currently seeing the heaviest rainfall in a century. Flash floods have devastated large parts of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Footage beamed by TV channels showed streets and houses had become a mass of rubble. About 55 people have died so far while CNN reported in Germany’s worst hit Rhineland-Palatinate state, 1,300 people have gone missing in the district of Ahrweiler.
At the other end of the Globe, Australia witnessed the hottest and driest year in history in 2020, and its summer of 2021 saw a wave of scorching temperatures and bushfires. Sydney recorded temperatures of over 40 °C in January this year, while a rash of wildfires destroyed homes, and killed 33 persons and about a billion native animals. Weather data showed that between 2014 and 2018, summers were 50% longer, and winters had become shorter.
Rising temperatures
Global warming, and the ecological damage it wrecks, has no borders. The earth’s atmosphere has always acted like a greenhouse to capture the sun’s heat, permitting humans, animal and plant life to thrive. However, over time, the heat being radiated out into space is being trapped under a film of greenhouse gases, slowly raising the temperature of the earth’s surface.
Climate scientists estimate that land and ocean temperatures have increased at an average of 0.08 °C (Celsius) per decade since 1880; but the average rate of increase since 1981 at 0.18 °C has been more than twice the earlier rate. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2005, and 7 of the 10 have occurred just since 2014. The year 2020 has been the second-warmest year of all time.
Among the greenhouse gases that is trapping the heat, creating a pressure-cooker effect around the earth’s surface, is carbon dioxide (Co2) estimated to make up 80% of these gases. Co2 is being emitted mainly from burning fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - fuels that are used for everything from powering vehicles and generating electricity to manufacturing industrial chemicals.
There has been a 2-degree increase in global average surface temperature that has occurred since the pre-industrial era (1880-1900). It looks small, but the accumulated heat has a huge impact. The additional heat is causing huge climate change that is reducing snow cover, pouring billions of liters of water that is raising sea levels, intensifying heavy rainfall and changing agricultural patterns for the worse.
The EU sets new targets
It is in this context, the European Union (EU) has just announced, ahead of the US summit on Climate Change, a path-breaking initiative to become climate-neutral by 2050 - an economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. These are in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, but have more specific targets now for Europe. It also includes a deal to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030.
Other key elements include complete phasing out of petrol and diesel cars by 2035; and increasing the binding target of renewable sources in the EU’s energy mix to 40% from the earlier 32%. The EU package is under attack both from the Greens, who say it does not do enough, as well as from the corporate sector like airlines, who accuse the EU of setting up an ‘unequal’ playing field. However, given the rapidly deteriorating climatic conditions, the EU package must be supported as it has clear targets to stem the rot. It will also force the pace of change on other regions.
What seems to be missed out in the Climate Change agenda is the failure to identify key global degradation areas like the Amazon rain forests and the Arctic meltdown. In the Amazon, 17% of the rain forests of south America have been destroyed deliberately by policies such as those of the current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. It has put the region’s climate systems at risk. Global intervention to stall further destruction is necessary in such cases. Like stopping nuclear proliferation, limiting climate change is no more a ‘national’ issue.