How I Got My Crazy Ideas!

Published 05th October 2010 - 2 comments - 598 views -

As I was thinking few days ago about the COP16 in Cacun, Mexico in coming November, I could not help but feel somewhat despondent. May be I hoped too much of COP15 and it did not deliver, at least not how I expected. Getting a world consensus on anything is tough – having consensus on environmental issues and their mitigation looks like a near impossibility. The state of affairs as such and Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012, future looks bleak.

This makes me wonder whether political machinery of the world is the right agent to handle the issues. Do our leaders really understand the urgency? IPCC is not really a scientific body, not in the way CERN is. What the countries represent here are political stands and popular aspirations of people of the countries (as apprehended by the Governments). While this leaves a weapon of logic for the contrarians (who claim that AGW is nothing more than a hoax), the process by which IPCC is trying to have an agreement between countries and some environmental protocol to arrest AGW, which in turn is expected to control Climate Change is bound to create conflicts.

I wonder if COP16 is going to be more of a conflict resolution exercise than a meeting delivering some effective policies – rational and acceptable by all. Sorry, if I sound paranoid, but that’s a feeling in my guts.

The world seems to have split in to two compartments as far as Climate Change and its mitigation is concerned. One compartment is tiny – where few scientists, experts and activists claim that they can sense a catastrophe and want to act. The other compartment is huge – where there is mixture of groups of people having different opinions but ultimately do not want to act and prefer to wait till such time a ‘magic cure’ is found by the other compartment. I can propose the following 4 important groups in the huge compartment:

• Contrarians: They believe that AGW is a hoax, even on the face of a considerable body of evidence suggesting that we have trampled with the Nature in a critical way and are ourselves causing the Climate Change partially. Contrarians not only challenge the scientific evidence, they confidently support and encourage economic growth unhindered by environmental constraints and consumption of key resources without the need of recycling or renewability. From extreme to moderate, contrarians either accuse AGW proponents as anti-development doom-saying ‘environuts’ or just laugh away the AGW. Michael Crichton had been a famous contrarian.

• Skeptics: They are doubtful about the scientific integrity of AGW. Since, Global warming and Climate Change are also due to natural causes and in considerable areas these natural causes overlap with man-made causes and make results and data obscure, the skeptics question the AGW or rather demand empirical proof for it. Skeptics stand out as hard-core science buffs who are more interested in the ‘why and how’ part of Climate Change than in the ‘what’ part.

• Fence Sitters: They see no point in accepting any one of the philosophies of Climate Change right now – either against or in favor. They take Climate Change and Global Warming in terms of media value – something of popular interest. Fence Sitters keep both the avenues (towards Contrarians or towards environmental activist) open and prefer to wait to see whose claim wins.

• Ignorant: The biggest group of all, they are simply ignorant of Climate Change or Global Warming as human issues. They are not ignorant by choice but ignorant by situation. A massive population in the world are too busy coping with famine, poverty, civil war, ethnic or racial conflicts, terrorism, religious bigotry, economic down turn and it is only natural that they are ignorant about Climate Change and its implication in future life.

I suppose I am within the tiny group of environment activists, but will admit that at times of despair I doubt my position and dread if I have degraded to a Fence Sitter. But most certainly I am not contrarian, skeptic or ignorant.

Perhaps reading and knowing about ‘green’ affairs does not satisfy my soul. Despite my limitations and mediocrity, I fail to dispel a sense of confused urgency to do something about Climate Change. It has become sort of personal to me.

Being a commoner, I feel an urgent need to have mass awareness about the impact of Climate Change to win over the ignorant and indifferent. I wish that experts learn to speak about the issues to common man in terms relatable to common life. If someone says that one sent email causes 4 gm CO2 e emission in the atmosphere, will it not make more sense? Or say, in 2009 the total spam email worldwide caused an emission equivalent to driving around in car 1.6 million times? When we talk about consumption of resources, if one says that one poor woman in India with 7 children would need 10 more kids to equal the consumption of one American lady with just one kid – will that not give common man a better perspective of developing and developed societies? Conflicts arise out of difference in common perception. Perhaps we need uncommon yet relatable perception to achieve unanimity.

The concept of infinite growth within a system of finite resources is utopian. A world obsessed with consumption is hardly qualified to handle Climate Change. Only a radical change in our ways of life and how we interact with Nature can bring about an agreement and an effective cure of environmental degradation. This brings me to some of my crazy ideas; ideas that I will share with THINKers.

 

Category: Climate History, | Tags:

Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
Kolkata
Civil Engineer

Pabitra is an Honors graduate in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has specialized in the field of River Hydraulics working for more than two decades training rivers, protecting banks and beaches and fighting erosion of the river banks/beds. He has worked with Bio-Engineering models involving mangroves using them as tools for cost effective and natural means of anti-erosion technology.His work is mostly concerning the extremely morpho-dynamic Hugly estuary with Bay of Bengal In course of his work, he got exposed to indegenious people of the Sunderban wetlands, who are fighting a losing battle against agressive Industrialization. Pabitra loves to read and write and he is full of crazy ideas. He believes that he has a tryst with the strange river-country south of Bengal.

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