Mankind is riding for a fall
Irfan Asghar
Despite being endowed with exponentially sheer powers of insight and
abstraction by Almighty Allah, the human beings have failed to be
sagacious and responsible stewards of this planet. They have botched up
the matters relevant to the climate of the planet by disparaging and
playing around with it. The magnitude of the climatic devastation we are
afflicted with, is not emblematic of a planet keeping an even strain but
of one thrashing through the alternating chills and night sweats of a
serious illness. Admittedly, the phrases of “global warming”, “climate
in crisis” and “malfunctioning of the global thrermostat” are hitting
the headlines, flashing up on the screen and causing a splash across the
globe but the climate continues to be the Cinderella of the denizens of
this planet and has fallen a prey to the dilly – dallying approach. For
instance, despite being the world’s biggest pollutor, throughout
combustible George Bush’s presidency, America has dug in its heels and
taken a dim view of any law to combat the greenhouse gases like carbon
dioxide which cause global warming.
All Gore, the former US Vice-President who has organized Save Our Selves
( SOS ), the campaign for a climate crises, says that the global warming
sceptics are looking at a burning candle and speculating that perhaps
the baby is flame – resistant. He mouths off at this issue and reckons
that mankind faces “a planetary emergency” and “a crisis that threatens
the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the earth” but
the nerve – wrecking feature is that the pace of efforts to tackle the
problem is glacial.
The phenomenon of global warming is fraught with grim and disastrous
results. It is melting the Artic ice at such a rapid pace that a new sea
route is opening up between the Atlantic and the Pacific – and with it
the risk of a territorial dispute between Canada and the United States.
Many a island and archipelago are becoming uninhabitable due to global
warming. For instance Shishmaref, Alaska, an island that has been
inhabited by Inupiat Eskimos for 4,000 years, is facing evacuation
because the temperature on the island has risen 15 °F over the last 30
year. Sea levels are picking up in the Bay of Bengal and pushing Salty
Water inland, forcing farmers to adapt by switching from rice crops to
prawns. Climate change is going to have catastrophic impact on dryish
parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. While the rate of warming may
be higher in the Arctic and Antarctic, it is subsistence farmers in poor
places who stand to lose most. Africa’s reliance on rain-fed farming
makes it acutely vulnerable. Even a modest warming of 2 ºC will mean
more evaporation and less water in lakes, watering holes and stream
beds. A predicted rise in the volatility of rainfall may have worse
effects. There will be more droughts and more floods. Russia, long a
half- frozen terra incognita, will find its interior frontiers thrown
wide open as the Siberian Tundra turns to fertile prairie. The rain
forests of the Amazon could be Savanna by 2100. Sahara will grow even
Larger.
The raving poignant reality is that we are locked into certain degree of
climate change. Because the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on climate
change ( IPCC) did not made bones while raising the spectre that even if
we manage to curb greenhouse – gas emissions, which cause global
warming, well and truly today, the temperature would continue to climb
through the rest of the century because of the amount of carbon we have
already added to the atmosphere. The glaring example of this is that
atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide were 379 parts per million ( p.p.m
) in 2005, higher than at any time in the past. The doomsayers of the
panel predict that temperature will rise 4 degrees Celsius or more by
the end of the century. The panel has held the human activities of
overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide since 1750 culpable for
the bog we are in. It is a foregone conclusion that the posterity will
have to pay for our carbon sins.
Keeping in view the gravity and severity of the situation, we need to
act with both guns blazing. To head off the worst effects of global
warming, we will have to take recourse to both bottom up and top-down
approaches while putting into effect the rules and regulations and
strategies should be hammered out to breathe down the violators’ neck. A
raft of measures which can be used to ward off the environment
apocalypse can be discussed as follows: To start with, there is carbon
tax. To dial down the carbon dioxide emissions, tax should be levied on
pollution, particularly carbon dioxide. A set tax rate is placed on the
consumption of carbon in any form with the motive that raising the price
will cajole industries and individuals into consuming less. Secondly,
there is a cap-and-trade system of the sort Europe introduced to meet
the Kyoto targets. It would restrict companies emissions while allowing
them to buy and sell permits to pollute. Companies that restrain their
emissions below the cap can sell their remaining allowance on a carbon
market, while companies that exceed their limits must purchase credits
on that market rate.
Thirdly, lavish money should be used to enable the poor make the
transition to a low- carbon lifestyle. Fourthly, concerted efforts
should be underway to forge a strong global alliance to cut emission and
enforce it by 2010, because only an unprecedented international
consensus can remedy the situation. Fifthly, there is need to stop
building new coalfired power plants unless they can capture and
sequester the carbon they emit. And lastly, alternatives like windmills,
solar panels and nuclear plants can be pressed into service in this
regard. We should jack up our investment in alternatives.
While going about to pursue the abovementioned measures, over grit
should not tail-off and the govts. of all the countries should not drag
their feet. The costs of inaction will be staggering for us as the
Cassandras have a sense of foreboding and they live in dread of graver
repercussions.
—The writer is an analyst of international politics. |
