Khalid Saleem
THE ‘Climate Conference’ in Paris some years ago had reached an agreement of sorts on certain aspects of climate change. It was heart-warming to note that in a world, in which human values – what to talk of human life – have lost all sanctity; there existed people who still worried about such causes as global warming. It tended to restore whatever little faith one had in human nature. One came across a disturbing item of news the other day about the melting of Greenland’s ice cap. According to the AFP, the melting had gone so far that it was now irreversible, with snowfall no longer able to compensate for the loss of ice. The item quoted a statement from Ohio State University stating that “Greenland’s glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts”.
The subject in question is hardly new. The menace of global warming has been in the news off and on for years on end. Not many people who matter took it seriously enough, though. There is a notable tendency among people to adopt a lackadaisical attitude until a hazard rears its ugly head. Very few in this unheeding world of ours had taken this issue seriously until the tsunami and earthquake disasters turned everything upside down. Just as now the world has been caught off guard by the Pandemic. During the many Multilateral Conferences in the past, when the subject of global warming came up it was brushed aside by the developed world as a Third World worry. Why bother, they appear to have argued, if merely a few measly poor nations were in danger of being submerged by the rising sea? It was hardly worth sacrificing the First World’s prerogative to burn fossil fuel to its heart’s content! Besides, it was considered expedient to fob off the responsibility on those Third World states that were eking out a measly living through the clandestine sale of their rain-forest timber. The Developed World was never expected to be on the receiving end of things.
Nature is a great leveller. It somehow refuses to give special preference to the rich and prosperous. Man-made disasters may target the poor and the deprived, but nature shows no such bias. It was interesting, therefore, to come across, several years back, a series of four articles by a Barry James in the International Herald Tribune each on one of “Four Battlefronts” in, what was termed as, the “war against effects of climate change”. What was of special interest was the fact that the four “Battle Fronts” selected by the author all happened to be in the Developed World.
The first of the series, relating to Venice – the much-heralded city of “romantic canals and splendid palaces”- was of direct relevance to the Third World. It appears that Venice had already sunk a good depth of a step due to the indiscriminate drainage of the underground water table during industrialization. This had had the effect of leaving several Venetians in ankle deep water in their homes and work places. Now, the specter of the aftermath of global warming is sending shivers down the spines of residents of low-lying areas around the vulnerable areas of the richer parts of the globe. Regrettably, the same cannot be said about the Third World countries that are projected to be on the “hit list” of global warming. For one, tens of millions of hapless people, mainly in South and Southeast Asia, face serious or permanent flooding of their lands if the climate change predictions become a reality.
The World Metrological Organization (WMO) termed a recent decade as the warmest since accurate records began to be maintained in the mid 19th century. The collapse of a huge ice shelf in the eastern Antarctic was reported some years ago. This was apparently due to rise in the temperatures in the region. Scientists surmised that, if the present trends continue unabated, the Arctic could well turn into a navigable ocean by the middle of this century. This is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly. The ecological disaster that such a change could bring in its wake should be enough to goad all mankind sit up and take notice. The tragedy is that the world is still engaged in playing ducks and drakes with this issue, as it is with several other issues of far reaching import. Multilateral diplomacy, which has progressively become the bane of what we euphemistically refer to as “our civilization”, has once again been let loose in the world’s arena.
Meanwhile, several ecological upheavals are clearly visible on the horizon. The melting of huge chunks of ice near the North Pole is already the cause of serious concern. Not only will the loose chunks of ice pose an avoidable hazard to the shipping in the region, the consequential rise in the level of the ocean will be a danger for the low-lying landmasses in the area. Nearer home, there is an ecological disaster waiting to happen in the Siachin region, where the glacier is in imminent danger of melting. Experts have already warned that unless the military operations in the area are terminated and the forces withdrawn an ecological catastrophe of immense proportions is waiting round the corner. The moot question is: will the two sides take time off from their inane sparring sessions to pay some serious attention to averting the ecological disaster waiting to happen? Global warming is hardly a phenomenon to be taken lightly. The future of millions of human beings is at stake. The sooner the powers that be choose to realize – and take action to avert – the impending danger, the better it will be for mankind. Time is of the essence. The world would need to act before it gets too late. Or would it take Mother Nature to set off another Pandemic to awaken the world from its slumber?
— The writer is a former Ambassador and former Assistant Secretary General of OIC.
