Havoc, havoc everywhere

A picture speaks a 1,000 words, it is said, and we have all been watching numbing images and videos of nature's ferocity ravaging our planet over the last few weeks. But words can do a lot of talking as well. And I am a columnist, not a photographer; I shall thus lean somewhat on just a few of the recent headlines from publications around the world to give us all a whiff, a grim reminder if you will, of all that is going wrong with weather systems and normal life around us.

Here are but a few that Google throws up in response to a quick search.

• 44 dead as flash floods hit New York area in "historic" weather event

• Searches, sorrow in wake of hurricane Ida's destructive, deadly floods in the US

• We left it in God's hands, says people as floods wreck Spanish seaside town Alcanar

• Joe Biden calls emergency in New Work over heavy rain and floods

• Village in Bihar's Vaishali district inundated amid massive floods

• Animals flee from fatal floods in Kaziranga National Park, get hit by vehicles

• Hyderabad cloudburst leaves many parts of the city flooded

• Relief material for people affected due to floods in Uttar Pradesh

• Germany's deadly floods were up to 9 times more likely because of climate change

• Freak rainstorm in Iceland where it has only snowed since recorded history

• Forest fires ravage Canada amid extreme and unprecedented heat wave

• Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh see deadly landslides after cloudbursts

…The list goes on and on and on.

Depressing saga indeed

It is a scary saga, one that the world has known for years is in the making, but not much has been achieved at mitigating this and no one ever foresaw or warned of the sheer speed and ferocity of changing weather patterns. Worse still, 'experts' now warn that this is just the beginning, the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and that we can expect such events to become a regular occurrence. The only thing that will change is the sheer intensity of these aberrations, which will only increase with time as mankind continues to tear the very fabric on which the world's weather systems have been dependent on for centuries.

Worldwide, Global Warming and Climate Change are today playing havoc with the very infrastructure systems that catalyzed their runaway growth in the first place. Highway systems, rail networks, the building of dams to power high-rise buildings in bustling metropolises, metro and rapid transports systems all increased urbanization and saw massive deforestation and the slow but systematic removal of Climate-impacting and supporting natural phenomenon. Ironically, today that very removal is driving dangerous and disruptive Climate Change – forest fires, freak heat and cold waves, as well flooding in towns and rail systems around the world. Flooded tunnels and stations have disrupted service and stranded passengers in Boston, London, San Francisco, Taipei, Bangkok, Washington DC and a host of other cities in recent years.

But this year has been grim indeed, to an extent because it comes hot on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already left all of the global economies reeling. The billions upon billions of dollars in lost properties, and the sheer fear and misery caused by the new climate outbreak is devastating, financially and emotionally.

Forecasts are gloomy

In a recent report, the United Nations' climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has highlighted the physical changes already happening around the world and those projected to occur as a result of human activity, leading to extreme climate events such as devastating floods and destructive wildfires.

The report also underlined five key messages that it saw as majorly impacting the world and mankind. One, under all emissions scenarios outlined in the report, the Earth's surface warming is projected to reach an additional 1.5C or 1.6C in the next two decades, thus leaving an increasingly narrow pathway to stabilizing temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, which was the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. Two, the report also concluded that human activity is driving extreme weather, being amongst the "main drivers of more frequent or intense heat-waves, glaciers melting, ocean warming and acidification". Three, as a race now, we understand Climate Change and its causes better today than ever before.

Four, and most worryingly, the report suggests that we are almost at the point of no-return. The report sounds the alarm about the possibility of irreversible changes to the climate, often called 'tipping points'. This could lead to forests dying as temperatures rise, becoming less able to absorb carbon di-oxide, leading to further warming. Or Antarctic ice sheets could become destabilized, leading to rapid sea level rise of more than a meter by 2100 and 15 meters by 2500. And five, methane levels are rising fast in the atmosphere, and this gas has 84 times the impact on Global Warming than CO2 over a period of 20 years. Even just a strong and rapid reduction in methane emissions can curb global warming and significantly improve air quality.

That's a lot to chew on.

US, Europe eye-openers

I am Indian, a proud one at that, but I yet can still unabashedly say that in a country of our size, scale of infrastructure development and sheer natural diversity (hence geographical frailty in certain places), natural calamities and seasonal disasters are always waiting to happen. What is shocking and sad to see is that what has happened in the United States and Europe just last week and month – extreme climate oscillation, swelling and bursting river-banks, flooded cities and underground subway networks, raging forest fires, unseasonal heat-waves followed by freakish snowstorms. These weather patterns underscore how even developed countries are not safe from the severe impacts of extreme weather, mood swings that are getting more unpredictable and vicious with Climate Change.

There is a section of Climate Change activists that largely blame our Carbon Footprint for the disastrous upsurge in changing weather patterns. They recommend an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels as a key mitigation measure. Their brethren propound a Hydrogen Economy, where hydrogen would be used in place of the fossil fuels that currently provide four-fifths of the world's energy supply and emit the bulk of global greenhouse gases. This could aid climate goals, they claim, because hydrogen only emits water when burned and can be made without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Use of clean hydrogen as a fuel could slash aviation emissions, including a complete transition from conventional jet fuel by around 2050.

But I have to be quick to point out here that there are many others who point out that there has been no 'real study' into hydrogen technology's potential environmental challenges. Some even claim that using hydrogen as a fuel might make Global Warming worse by affecting chemical reactions in the atmosphere.

That's some more to chew on.

No clear answers

Quite simply, there are no clear answers, except for one – that the Climate Change disasters of the last month across the globe brutally underscore the need for steelier resolve and introduction of globally-accepted norms to bring about change while we still can. Global powers and superpowers have, at large, been dilly-dallying around this very real and burning issue, putting national and regional interests first, often even forcing smaller nations to follow their diktat while their own industrial and mining machineries keep chugging along, spewing dangerous and lethal gases into the Earth's atmosphere.

Paradoxically, the timing right now could be conducive to greater global harmony on moves to take on this fast-growing menace to the planet. Most of the world large and small has been reeling under the deadly impact on changing and freakish weather patterns. And the very fact that such events can affect Developed Nations and their established infrastructure even more than smaller nations could just have the sobering impact that is needed to bring in some pliability in the otherwise very divergent stands of the Big Seven on Climate Change.

The writer is a communications consultant and a clinical analyst. narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal