This commentary, which I will send to the editor after a final round of read-through, is an example of how the blog-posts and comments are not mere rants ;)
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“The whole world is getting hotter, sir” said the auto-rickshaw driver on a warm December afternoon in Chennai, India, as he drove me to the hospital where my aunt had been admitted to the ICU.
It was not only that auto-rickshaw driver, but everybody that I talked to over the three weeks of my annual trip to the old country seemed to have plenty to say about global warming.
An old high school friend, Ramesh, was blunt when we talked about the unusually warm December. “Only Americans don't recognize the reality of global warming," he complained. It is the Republican Party that does not even acknowledge climate change, I responded. My weak defense of my land and its people did not win me any brownie points.
There is immense concern in India for a reason—the facts of global warming are very much a part of daily life. Newspaper commentaries and television shows reflect nothing but worries. There is no denial of the reality.
Back in the old country, temperatures throughout the year are warmer than usual. In a coastal city like Chennai, the warmer temperature along with high humidity makes life highly uncomfortable, to say the least. “Endless summers,” my father complained. Rains—even the once predictable monsoons—are increasingly erratic. Even worse, every monsoon season is seemingly punctuated by extreme weather events.
In December 2015, Chennai had rains and floods that were far beyond anything that even the oldest living person had experienced. In December 2016, a cyclone ripped through the city. People were, therefore, expecting the worst in 2017, especially after the fake predictions of earthquake and tsunami off the southern coast—rumors that spread far and wide thanks to the extensive use of WhatsApp and Facebook.
Fortunately, the December heat was all the people of Chennai had to deal with. But, the extreme weather did not spare the state of Tamil Nadu, for which Chennai is the capital.
On November 30th, Cyclone Ockhi made landfall in the southern peninsular tip of the Subcontinent. 245 people died, according to official counts, with nearly 700 still missing after more than a month. Thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged, and the transport and telecommunications infrastructure took a beating as well.
Until recently, scientists were not sure whether such extreme weather events can be attributed to climate change, even though their studies predicted such outcomes. We laypeople were left to speculate whether such events could be mere accidents. Not anymore. Scientists have been steadily confirming that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then there is no denying that it is indeed climate change!
Examining the extreme weather events of 2016, scientists delivered a firm conclusion about the causation. “Climate change was a necessary condition for some of these events in 2016, in order for them to happen,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, who is the Editor in Chief of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in New Orleans this past December. Climate change was the culprit in approximately 65 percent of the examined cases over the past six years.
Even here in the United States, extreme weather events like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and the very late in the season fires in California, caused tremendous damage to life and property this past year alone. And then there were other disasters around the world—like the terrible floods in Nepal. The German reinsurance company Munich Re recently cautioned that “our experts expect such extreme weather to occur more often.”
Yet, America stands alone on the global stage with its vehement denial of climate change and its human causation. My friend Ramesh echoed the sentiments of many when he commented that they cannot do anything about the US. “Countries like India will simply have to suck it and move on.” He continued with, “at least out of sheer self interest, India must drive environmentally friendly energy sources, just as China is doing. If these two do a good job and Europe maintains the high ground it currently occupies, then maybe it might, just, be manageable.”
The rest of the world has seemingly given up on the US when it comes to addressing global climate change. Meanwhile, in pursuing an “America First” approach, we are oblivious to the reality that there is no wall that we can build in the atmosphere in order to create our own climate.
If only we understood how much our lives are intricately connected to the life of an auto-rickshaw driver on the other side of the planet!
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