The warming caused by greenhouse gases manifests in multiple ways throughout the world.

   A little more than a year earlier, in June 2013, intense rain battered Uttaranchal, causing landslides and exacerbating glacier melt, leaving thousands dead. And there was separate factor at play behind the sudden floods: the rupture of the Chorabari Tal – a lake formed by the retreat of the Chorabari glacier above the Kedarnath town. Experts think the lake probably burst because the heavy rain overwhelmed its boundaries.

So, what does climate change have to do with this?

   The International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), the leading group of the world’s scientists says that glacier melting (retreat) and intense rainfall events are two leading manifestations of the warming weather. While urban encroachment on the river floodplains definitely made the damage and death toll worse, the intense rainfall events and the glacier retreat were perhaps made worse by global warming.

What is climate change?

   Climate change is the warming of the world caused by greenhouse gases that trap some of the heat emanating from the world which would have otherwise escaped into space. There are other pieces to this: the ozone layer, the carbon soot, other aerosols, the ice shielding parts of the world, the ocean circulation – all of which we shall look at later.

But for now, let us look at the evidence close to home of the change in our climate. The primary manifestation is temperature.

It has gotten warmer. Chennai has warmed by >1°C in the past 100+ years. Rameswaram, near Madurai, is even worse; it has warmed by 1.5 °C in the past 40 years! But surely 1°C is not a big deal – even the variation between days is more than that. A change of 1°C for a few days, months or even a couple of years may lead to higher cooling costs and slightly worse tempers. A sustained warming of the climate, even by 1 °C, is a big deal and has lasting negative impacts for the world, and especially for hot, dry countries like India.

What are the manifestations of climate change?

   There are three key impacts of a sustained rise in temperature: ice melting, more humidity in the air and livings things getting out of their comfort zone. We’ll dive into the first now, and leave the others for the next time.

   When its warmer than it has been in the past for a long time, ice melts. We have ice on top of mountains, glaciers and mainly, ice near the poles. For example, the Gangotri glacier has receded (or melted) by more than 1 km in the past 100 years. Most of that melting, 850m or so, has come in the past 25 years. Experts say the glacier is receding by 12­13 m per year now. That is about ice area equal to 5 football fields every year melting out of Gangotri, and the same (or more) is happening across most of our world’s glaciers.

   So, what happens to this enormous amount of water that is now available. It runs through rivers, causing more flooding on the way, into the ocean. We haven’t built the capability to divert some of this additional water runoff into our depleting groundwater aquifers (underwater storage of water), so most of it goes into the ocean or evaporates. This brings us to another oft-­mentioned impact of global warming: sea level rise. Researchers using NASA data have estimated that if all of the ice in the glaciers were to melt, the sea level would rise by 17” – a lot but not catastrophic.

   But there’s more ice in this world – most of it is held in the gargantuan ice sheets in Greenland and in Antarctica. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely it would raise the sea level by 7m; if the Antarctic ice sheet were to completely melt, the sea would rise about 60m. So, it is no surprise that the ~40­ member alliance of Small Island Developing States (SIDS in UN­ talk) are amongst the most vociferous voices raised to call for curbing climate change. They stand to lose their homes, their country in the coming century. Next time, we shall go deeper into the second impact: increasing humidity and the consequent changes in rainfall. That strikes far closer to home.

Climate change has multiple manifestations that will impact each region differently

Talking to a group of farmers near Madurai revealed that this is the first winter in 3 years where they have been able to plant rice. Rains have failed for many years, and Raja, a small farmer, has found it hard to make ends meet. A warmer world is different in many ways from the one we have known. Rising CO2 levels causes a rise in the world’s temperature through the greenhouse effect. This temperature increase has many different second round effects (shown in the figure). The effects shape and are shaped by the water cycle of the world – by ocean currents and winds, manifesting differently across the world. Thus, Australia will likely be plagued by drought as will China, California and parts of India. Canada is likely to get warmer and receive more rain. More parts of the US will be plagued by mosquitoes. The eastern seaboard of the US is likely to be increasingly subject to stronger storms. African agriculture is likely to be ravaged by numerous threats. In some models, summer temperatures in the Mediterranean are expected to rise by 9C by the end of this century. Bangladesh, with its low lying deltas , will face the brunt of sea level rise. Temperature increases in the mountain tops of Himachal are projected to damage its apple crop.

These are then some of the “Avatars” or manifestations of a changing climate:

We will act only if it makes sense personally for us to act

• Economists subscribe to the theory that unless the incremental benefit of changing is greater than the incremental cost of that change, the change will not occur.
• Be aware: Change is costly if the government has to spend on development of drought resistant rice varieties the same money that could have been spent elsewhere - on primary education teachers in Bihar or in flood relief in Kashmir.
• Likewise, changing our regular light bulbs to energy efficient LED bulbs is expensive and giving up eating meat or taking a bus (instead of driving a car) is harder. We may have to consume differently – the types of clothes we buy or in our travel habits. If all of us choose to travel less, our already sorely-beset travel industry may suffer more, leading to job losses.

To judge if changes initiated by the government or the changes we make in our consumption pattern is worthwhile, we have to answer the following question: How does climate change affect or likely to affect you?

First, let's start with you. Who are you? The 2011 Indian Census reveals that (if you are Indian) you are likely to be young (less than 40) and of modest means. As a reader of this paper, you are likely to be urban and well educated. So let us consider climate change impact from two perspectives: from that of a middle class urban household and a youth from the farming community.

The household depends on erratic water supply from the Corporation. The water comes in the pipeline only on alternate days and the quality of the water is not consistent either. The bore in the apartment complex is running dry and buying water is shrinking savings. The power cuts have started again because the windmill generation has stopped. Traffic-congested roads means the breadwinners spend more hours on the commute. The children are in school and getting into good colleges is very hard, making the parents spend extra on tuitions. The son suffers from asthma and inhalers are a constant fixture in the household. Food prices are still going up but not as much as they used to.

Fast forward 20 years. We do little to change our ways. Leading climate scientists then think the urban family's life is about to get a lot harder. Water will be the hardest issue - there will be nowhere close to enough of it. What is free (or nearly so) today will become scarce and, therefore, expensive. Nights will become much hotter, which will increase cooling costs. Food prices are likely to shoot up, since scientists are quite certain that crop yields will fall fast in most scenarios. More people with asthma and inhalers will become a way of life. Life will be harder in other ways. More and more families will come into cities - driven by desperation, failing crops and hope. Crime rate will be high and housing expensive. There will be less money to pay for tuitions, good schools and fun outings. This is significant as competition to get ahead is fierce.

Even then this life may appear good when compared to the boy from the farms. Today, he leads a hard life, even after getting so many things for "free": free water, free cycle, free power, minimum prices for crops, free education. Wow! That's not a bad life. Look a little closer - the free education is worth what he pays for it. Pratham's recent report on education tells us that nearly one-third of Class II children studying in rural government schools cannot recognise letters! Still, he tries hard and his family sacrifices so that he can leave farming behind and start out in the city.

Fast forward 20 years again. His family's crops are failing - the rain is erratic and the groundwater has dried up. It's so hot now that the plants wilt sooner than they ever used to. The insect cycle (pollination etc.) that was so closely coordinated with the crops earlier is now out of sync, playing havoc with the yields. Without new seed varieties, increasing fertiliser has not really increased the yield, but taken up extra cost. His dream of attending college is dead. His family no longer has the money to send him.

Predicting the future climate is a difficult job. As a species, we are still in learning process, learning about the inter-linkages, feedbacks and even about parts of the planet that are beginning to affect the climate. But how much we know so far? Every four years, with increasing stridency and certainty, hundreds of the world's leading scientists remind us how we are changing the climate through our actions and the impacts of that change are going to hit hardest on those of us living in hot dry climates and most of all on the poor.

Given this, should we act?

Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The next article in this series will appear on March 6. Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming.

This photo provided by 6abc Action News shows the Inlet section of Atlantic City, N.J., as Hurricane Sandy makes it approach. (AP Photo/6abc Action News, Dann Cuellar)

Different countries are differently impacted, muddling motives to change Last time we considered climate change impacts from an Indian perspective and why it would make sense for us to act. But climate change is a global phenomenon caused by all of us in differing extents and affecting all of us in different ways

This is an important point. Understanding the differentiated impacts of climate change will help us understand why so little has been done so far. Impact here is defined by the IPCC, a group of 800+ of the world's leading climate scientists, as the intersection of risk, vulnerability and adaptation. An example may help: a very hot day, well above 100°F, is manageable if one can stay indoors in cold air conditioning. However, if one has an arduous manual job performed outdoors, a series of such days could prove fatal. The former is low impact while the latter is high impact.

The prisoner's dilemma provides a great framework to understand (in)action on climate change. This is a game in game theory that shows why two rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it maybe in their best interests to do so. The rules are as follows: Two prisoners are in two cells unable to talk together. They know this: if both keep silent, they both get off. If prisoner A squeals, but prisoner B is silent, prisoner A gets off and gets perks, while prisoner B goes to jail for 5 years and vice versa. If both squeal, they both go to jail for 2 years. Long story short, they both squeal, most of the time.

A woman covers her mouth during a sandstorm that hit in Lanzhou in northwest China's Gansu province. China's capital woke up to orange-tinted skies Saturday as the strongest sandstorm so far this year hit the country's north, delaying some flights at Beijing's international airport and prompting South Korean weather officials to issue a dust warning for Seoul. (AP Photo) ** CHINA OUT **

Climate change is a prisoner’s dilemma with horns and on steroids. If we, the world, cooperate, or arrest climate change, we all get a wonderful place to live. If we don’t, for some of us, our way of life ends. But wait, there’s more. If we don’t cooperate, we all don’t go to the same kind of prison - some of us stay out, some go to hell, some to a low security prison. Whether or not we will cooperate will depend (a) on how much it costs us, and (b) how much we gain by cooperating. The first step to solving this dilemma is to understand the payoffs (impacts) of key players in cooperating.

In Climate Change, the key players together constitute more than 50% of the world GDP, population and CO2 emissions. They are the US, China, the European Union and India.

Let’s start with the US. The US is geographically and politically very diverse. California and the US Southwest are and will be hit hardest by the changing climate. Much like India, they will become drier, so households and agriculture will be sorely beset. The rich and famous in Hollywood already spend crores of rupees a year in buying water. Forest fires, encouraged by increasing drought and heat, burned 9.2 million acres of forest in 2012 (roughly the size of Kerala) with rising risks to health and property. So it’s not surprising that Arnold Schwarzenegger, erstwhile Terminator and current governor of California, is a committed climate change fighter.

Moving to the East Coast: Hurricane Sandy that hit the US in 2012 left behind $60 billion in property damage and 150 deaths in its wake. The Northeast will be pounded by heavy rainfall and powerful storms as the climate warms leaving expensive infrastructure and the urban poor vulnerable to flooding and its aftermath.

The rest of the US will be affected by climate change but manageably so and many parts like the Midwest might even benefit with longer crop growing cycles and nicer weather. The Great plains of America is home to oil companies and oil-derived wealth and the fracking (getting oil & gas from shale rock) revolution - they will not want to give that up easily to lessen climate change especially as they are not impacted too much.

While President Obama and politicians from the badly impacted regions may push for climate action, the political process in the US prevents them from delivering substantive action.

On to China.

China is a powerful country with 1.3 billion mouths to feed and a third of its workforce in agriculture. Dust storms now bombard the capital, frequent droughts have begun to plague agriculture, floods and storms threaten the prosperous south-eastern cities and the air is thick with haze. Heat waves threaten the urban Chinese and incidence of dengue is set to increase. Many of China’s glaciers are predicted to disappear by 2050 further impacting agriculture, especially in the dryer north. China has woken up to the dangers of climate change and in typical Chinese fashion, has started to act. From next to nothing, China has the largest installed wind power capacity today and is targeting 70 GW of solar installations by 2017. It is the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer. China has been building another great wall - one made of trees to prevent sandstorms over Beijing.

Next time, we will look at the European Union and revisit India and see where that leaves us in solving the prisoner’s dilemma, and the climate problem.

Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The next article in this series will appear on March 20. Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming.

European lead is a positive step but Indian consequences still dire

Last time we looked at the differing impacts that climate change had on various countries and framed the discussion through the lens of a prisoner’s dilemma: two prisoners in separate cells; if they cooperate they’re free if they don’t they both go to jail.

This time we ask: “What do the prisoners do in this dilemma, and where does that leave the world?” The US “prisoner” has muddled incentives - parts of him lose heavily in the changing climate, parts are unaffected while some powerful parts of him stand to lose if status quo is altered. The payoff of the Chinese “prisoner” is uniformly negative if status quo persists - so he would prefer to see cooperative action on climate change. What of the two other “prisoners” - the EU and India?

European countries look like the poster children of action on climate change. Emissions of greenhouse gases (the causative agents of global warming) are down since 1990 and; a further binding 40% reduction in greenhouse gases (from 1990 levels) is targeted by 2030.

Europe achieved its targets for three reasons: the 2009 financial crisis and the 2011 Euro crisis caused the European economy to falter (and lowered the amount of energy it used), the outsourcing of production of a substantial fraction of the “stuff” consumed by European customers (and the emissions associated with producing the stuff) and the pursuit of renewable power. How they perform in future will depend on what their “payoff” is.

Air pollution (some of which exacerbates global warming) causes half a million deaths in Europe annually; Glacier melting and the flooding of rivers and rising sea levels threaten low lying countries like the Netherlands (where up to an eighth of the country lies below sea level). Intense water scarcity and increasing summer temperatures hurt agriculture and tourism income of Southern Europe. Many northern European countries benefit with lower heating costs, higher agricultural productivity and longer tourist seasons. There are winners and losers within Europe, but because Europe is developed, the losers can manage the changes.

Given the manageable negative payoff from climate change, why is Europe acting? Part of it maybe a desire to gain prominence in the world stage, a stage increasingly being dominated by the US and China. They can get leadership credibility only if they lead by example. Second, a higher sense of social equity in European countries may be driving action through a social justice angle. Third, European companies stand to gain from action on climate change. Some of the world’s leading wind energy manufacturers and LED lighting companies are European. 92% of responding Euro 300 companies report that climate regulation presents an opportunity to their business.

Now, India.

India is and will be badly affected by the changing climate. We are a hot, dry and poor country - thus vulnerable to the heating and drying aspects of climate change (think floods, droughts, lost livelihoods and increased infection) and with limited financial space to adapt. We have abundant reserves of relatively inexpensive coal. We have a young country with a large poor and middle class hungry for iphones and commercial dreams. They will want the government to spend on education and jobs, not on carbon sequestration. We cannot take on binding unilateral targets of emission without ambitious binding emission reduction commitments and financial assistance from developed countries. Why? India cannot afford to cut its emissions aggressively - but even if it did, this would be futile if the rest of the world continued to emit for then, the world would still get warmer.

Taken together, India’s payoffs if status quo persists are very negative unless everyone cooperates; China’s is negative; US’s is very mixed; Europe, though the status quo payoff is not very negative, by credibly signalling that they will always cooperate, has made it more likely for others to cooperate . Returning to the prisoner’s dilemma, if prisoner A knew with certainty that prisoner B would always keep silent (say he had a secret camera in prisoner B’s room), it is extremely likely he would keep quiet, thus enabling both of them to be set free. Consider this: Europe made its 40% emissions reduction public announcement in October 2014. The China and US joint announcement to curb greenhouse gas emissions came a month later, in November, after eluding the world for so long.

The depressing truth is that the differentiated “payoffs” from climate change makes substantive action unlikely in a consensus based forum like the UN. We could try for better success by framing the issue on moral grounds like slavery and shame countries into complying by invoking reputational consequences. But that’s a long shot.

Given this, how should India act?

(To be continued)

Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The next article in this series will appear on April 3. Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

(Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming.)

Adapting may be the best bet

In the last two articles we saw that given the differing impacts of climate change on different countries, the depressing reality might be that insufficient action against that change is the most likely outcome. Given this, how should India act?

We can think of action on climate change along two broad categories: Mitigation and Adaptation. The thinking behind mitigation is that let us lower the factors that contribute to climate change. A little bit of science and an example may help clarify this.

“Global warming” or the greenhouse effect is caused primarily by certain gases in our air which act like a semi transparent blanket (hence the name greenhouse gases): they allow the sun’s light and heat to reach the Earth and heat it but they make it harder for the Earth to release its own heat into space. The chief amongst these gases in heat-trapping potential is carbon dioxide (CO2). This is for two reasons: compared with other “greenhouse” gases, CO2 is the most abundant (I’m leaving aside water vapour for now), and secondly, CO2 tends to hang around for a really long time. Most of the released CO2 is removed within a year by plants by photosynthesis or by ocean absorption, but a fraction stays for over a 1000 years. Much of the CO2 level increase is driven by the burning of fossil fuels - coal, petrol, diesel, wood. So, to “mitigate” climate change, we should consume less fossil fuels - burn less coal, improve the fuel average in our car, take the bus, conserve forests etc.

This is pretty straightforward. Why don’t we do it then? Mainly because a strong economy pushes us in the opposite direction. Think of an economy doing well: most persons who want a job, have a job; many have options; people are going to the movies, eating out, buying stuff; travelling. There’s joy in the air: festivals are celebrated exuberantly. Those who might have bought a Hyundai i10, go for an i20; those who would have taken the bus, aspire for a car. Now look at what drives that: factories churning out more stuff, cars being driven more, more flights - all of this uses more power. Where does that power come from? From petrol or diesel for vehicles and from the grid, a grid that is supplied 60% by coal. Burning a kg of coal releases 2.86 kgs of CO2. So, a booming economy, most of the time, means more CO2. And India wants this. Because a booming economy is the best way to lift our poor out of poverty. Much like China did. Another reason why India is averse to mitigation is because India is reliant on coal, the most “emittive” of the fossil fuels. Generating power from solar could be three times more expensive than from coal; India cannot afford that. Think of another way to mitigate: build capital-intensive city transportation - like the Delhi metro. Convenient, clean and fast. On a per passenger km basis, the light rail option is a clear winner over cars or buses in terms of CO2 emissions and convenience. So why is this not happening faster in India? Building a km of metro takes about Rs. 300 crore. Building a metro system costs between Rs.30,000 to 90,000 crores to be useful. Investments such as these clamor with pay commission recommendations and subsidies for Finance Minister’s attention, often getting much less than needed. So mitigating on a macro scale is a tough ask.

What of adaptation? The philosophy behind this is that the world is changing, and is likely to keep changing. India, by virtue of being hot and dry, is likely to be subject to the worst effects of a warming climate and by being poor, has less “give” to deal with it. So given that inaction or insufficient action is the norm in climate change politics, let us start adapting to a warmer and drier climate. An example of this might be investing in genetically modifying our rice crop to withstand higher heat and/or lower water availability. Another example is to eat less meat, as meat tends to take more water per gram protein than plant-based protein like soya.

Let us consider the context: action can be macro, decided by countries. Action can be micro - decided by company and citizens like you and me. Let me pass on the action plan for the country. This is perhaps not the forum for it. Let me instead focus on the action plan for us. On a personal level. What can we do? Plenty. Let’s start with what we eat.

Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The next article in this series will appear on April 17. Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

By growing mangoes, oranges and jojoba in the desert, the West Asian country conveys the message of hope under changing climatic conditions

At the back of everyone’s minds, the worst fear regarding changing climate is how can we ever cope with a 4 degree Celsius temperature increase and increased drought, especially in regions like Tamil Nadu or Rajasthan? It’s not possible. I have heard scientists mention it off the record. I have felt it. And so, this thought, this fear leaves it sticky, hopeless residue on the actions we take or hope to take.

But in the past week, I visited a land that has not only overcome its lack of water, it has thrived, even to the astonishing reality today of exporting its water. It appears magical – especially since the country is in the middle of biblical realms – but it is not.

This land is Israel.

Seeing is believing and I saw Oranges and Jojoba plants growing straight out of desert sand. I was told earlier that cucumbers and mangoes grew here. Plants grow with higher yield and make commercial sense while factoring the full price of water. There are many lessons in this for us. Let me distil out the main ones. It is a parable of water.

When modern-day Israel came into being in 1948, it was a dry land. Water was to be found either in the northwest – in the Sea of Galilee or deep underground. About half the land was and is a desert. The mighty Negev in the south of Israel needed to provide food if the new nation was to offer a home to all the people flowing into it. So a grand plan was drawn up to divert the waters from the North East to the South. While that was a grand feat of engineering, there was an even remarkable concept supporting it. The Water Law passed in 1959 established water as a common property and removed the right to the groundwater found under the land from the person owning the land. In fact, even the sewage of a house in Israel does not belong to the household, it belongs to the state. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say. But in Israel, sewage, as we shall see, holds the key to making the desert hospitable.

Water is measured carefully in Israel and priced – everyone pays. While water was (and is) offered at a discount to the farmer, it was still priced. This has led to innovation to lower costs and improve profits. An early innovation was the invention of modern-day drip irrigation in the mid-1960s by Simcha Blass that allowed water to be directed to the roots of the plant thus minimising the loss to evaporation. He, in a joint venture with kibbutz Hatzerim (an agricultural settlement), founded a company called Netafim in 1965 that commercialised the technology. Drip irrigation has advanced considerably – both geographically and technologically. Often, all the nutrition and fertilization that a plant needs comes through the drip tubes and the soil has merely become an anchor to hold the roots of the plants. Indeed, I saw a company that places sensors on the plant to understand when the plant is “thirsty” and uses that information to turn on the drip!

Today, you can see the drip irrigation tubes everywhere in Israel: in the midst of small vegetation patches in the front of apartment complexes, alongside the orange trees in the farms, hidden 30 cm under the ground of the sandy desert watering the roots of the thirsty shrubs. A small price for water along with a carefully cultivated water-consciousness through repeated, consistent messaging has made the tubes affordable and desirable.

Add this to another innovation: the use of treated sewage to irrigate crops. Israel reuses 85% of its treated sewage or effluents – far ahead of any other country. This allows it to become “weather-independent” for its water needs. This journey of using reclaimed sewage water for agriculture also started in the 1960s and today has grown to be major source of usable water for the country.

You might think so what? The National Crime Record Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides Report says 11,744 farmers’ suicides occurred across India in 2013 with Maharashtra, a cotton growing state, accounting for 3,146. Studies on what drives farmers to commit suicide throws up water and irrigation issues as one of the main reasons. So when a water-stressed desert country can grow cotton at triple the yield of India, it warrants, at the very least, examination and nuanced emulation.

(Climaction is a fortnightly column published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The views expressed in the article are those of the author. The next article in this series will appear on November 13.

Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com)

(Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming)

Why the Chennai floods happened?

For a climate change column, writing about anything other than Chennai seems out of place. But so much has been already written about Chennai. Most of the readers will understand that global warming perhaps played a role in the unusual rains. This was compounded by an unmanaged urban sprawl that appropriated land from water bodies and sapped water channels of their main purpose: to carry water. A google search for #Chennairains yielded 25, 00,000 hits, while #Chennairainshelp yields a smaller 1, 24,000. Everyone knows someone in their first circle who is coordinating relief efforts. Is there more to add? Perhaps.

First, to provide context, let us ask: Was this caused by global warming?

One of the less endearing traits of global warming is the multiplicity of fingerprints it leaves on various ecosystems of the world. What were the ones this year?

Officials from NOAA and NASA are 99% sure that 2015 is the hottest year on record. Officials from the IMD are more certain: it is the hottest year, with temperatures in November being 1.25°C above normal.

The El Nino effect this year, driven by warmer temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean, held by many to be directly responsible for the Chennai rains, is one of the strongest on record.

Unseasonal rain in early 2015 led to record crop losses in Rabi crop in India, estimated by CSE to be in the vicinity of Rs. 20,000 crore. This is the third year running when unseasonal rain during harvest time has played havoc with agricultural yield of the Rabi crop. Higher temperatures in November and December of this year are causing delays in sowing wheat this year.

Nearly 2,500 people died in the heat wave of late May, mainly in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where temperatures reached 48°C.

We have had two weak monsoons in a row.

This is the textbook definition of how the impacts of global warming could play out in India: heat waves, changes in rainfall patterns and a probable increase in rainfall intensity.

Scientists will study models and will argue on whether climate change directly caused this particular tragedy or not. But they will all agree on one thing: with the temperatures rising, such events will definitely become more common in the days to come.

The next question could be: Could we have done better?

Well, we’ve reduced the number of water bodies in Chennai from 650 to less than 30. We have caused the decline of marshland area by 90%. We have tolerated the dumping of debris into the rivers and encroachments of flood plains. We know garbage piles up everywhere blocking sewers. Even if our eyes were blind, and we couldn’t smell, the rise in Dengue would serve to warn us.

Should we feign shock? There are so many articles about how humanity has risen while Chennai has sunk. There are hundreds of volunteers and service staff helping, helping: one friend put it as an 18 hour shift – every day – many of whom are placing their personal safety at risk. They are heroes. However, will the milk of human kindness run thinner when repeated shocks makes the novelty of being a hero wear off?

While it is convenient and comforting to blame the democratically elected politicians for the urban mess, this really was a team effort. From the papers that carried full page advertisement of glossy apartments built on marshland, to the millions of dollars of investment that poured in to finance the construction, to the thousands of jobs that the construction offered – either directly or indirectly to the thousands of people who happily bought the apartments, there were many players in the game.

The analogy that springs to mind is this: a man leads a stressful life, travels a lot and eats out a lot. He gives up exercising, sits on the couch and snacks away. He wears away his coping mechanisms a little at a time. When his wife asks him to eat healthier or exercise, he snaps “Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m really busy? Be more understanding. Then he has a heart attack, followed by another one shortly thereafter.

Yes, it is hard for our society to be less tolerant of lapses in the provision of services. Many of us have so little skin-in-the-game: the rich live in isolated cocoons. Even in the floods, the generators ran providing electricity. The poor often live in a parallel economy. Many of the poor don’t pay for the government services (often ending up paying higher to private parties), so don’t believe they can demand any quality, until of course, they lose everything in an incident such as this. The middle class, impotently sandwiched in between, seethe. We are even proud of our “Jugaad” way of coping, little realising that this chronic neglect will only result in tragedy.

But it is time to be less tolerant of this tendency in ourselves: to look away, to accept, to cope with a quick fix– that is the way to our salvation.

(Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The views expressed in the articles are those of the author.)

The next article in this series will appear on December 25, 2015.

Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

(Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming.)

With the series coming to conclusion, we need to consider the important choices before us -- what climate change is, what it will mean for India and importantly, what we can d

Climate change is much more than One degree C increase in temperature. A consistently warmer temperature fundamentally alters the way air holds moisture: warmer air can hold more vapour resulting in more intense rain alternating with multiple droughts. When coupled with unwise urban planning, this intense rainfall results in floods. Plants cannot adapt to such different patterns of rainfall. Agricultural yields fall steeply if we don’t adapt and it will and has caused extinctions of many species. Seas will rise and there will be salt water intrusion into ground water in coastal zones. There are and will increasingly will be frequent, deadly heat waves, with each new year setting a record in soaring temperatures.

It’s virtually certain that humans have caused this warming through the greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels like coal or diesel and increasing our livestock populations. Carbon dioxide tends to be long lived which makes it important to consider cumulative emissions when assigning blame and enlisting action.

Most importantly, this is not going to be an easy problem to solve. Why? Because each country is affected differently by the warming climate: warm, poor countries suffer both because of their already hot climates and their inability to cope, while cooler, wealthier climates suffer relatively less and importantly have the means to cope. There were celebrations about the Paris accord saying it was the tilting point of climate change action, but little has happened since then with richer nations not agreeing to legally binding cuts in emissions.

This means curbing climate change will need a “miracle” as Bill Gates recently called it.

With this in mind, and given India’s relatively small share in emissions and our current developing state, India should focus on adapting to a warmer world and taking “low-hanging” mitigating actions or those with substantial non-climate benefits. Here, it is important to bring up the oft-ignored concepts of “Attention” and “Execution”. As a country, with so many “urgent” to dos, the availability of both talented manpower and capable institutions are serious bottlenecks. This means, it is better for India to focus on a small set of actions and execute well.

There is another matter to consider. Climate Change is a classic example of what economists call the tragedy of the commons. This is a theory that says that individuals acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, behave against the whole group's best interests by depleting some common asset. India is particularly vulnerable to this. Farmers pump out water with impunity with no care of when that water might run out. FMCG companies make sachets for rural markets with no care of the disposal costs of those sachets. We export cubic kilometres of our ground water with the beef we export without receiving compensation for it.

Why is this?

One reason could be that we have so very little skin in the game. As Indians, we have one of the lowest tax bases in the country or tax share of GDP. The poor fall under the bracket, many others evade. We have one of the lowest rates of volunteering or giving charity. We don’t have a mandatory army service. We don’t have a jury service. It’s not mandatory to vote (details on climaction.net).

In several measurable dimensions, we are poor citizens. This is so clearly manifested by the common site of a shopkeeper sweeping the front of his shop clean while pushing the garbage onto the common road.

Why do I bring this up now?

Because so many of the actions needed to adapt to a warmer world need collective action – not dumping garbage into waterways, not building over water bodies, pumping ground water judiciously, executing a rapid bus transit system.

Tagore said it beautifully when he wrote “Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls”.

This is a personal, independent decision each of us has to make. Is each of us an island? Or are we fellow citizens of a country? The answer to this question determines your actions. And the collective weight of these actions determines the fate of our country.

(Climaction is a fortnightly column that is published in MetroPlus Weekend on alternate Fridays. The views expressed in the articles are those of the author.)

The last article in this series will appear on March 18, 2016.

Feedback and questions may be e-mailed to climaction2015@gmail.com

(Mridula Ramesh is the Executive Director of Sundaram Textiles. She is also a student and teacher of global warming.)

Our future is our choice

It’s 2050: Sunita wakes up in her new two-bedroom unit in Chennai. The sensors have slightly reduced the temperature in the room to let her body know it’s time to get up. Using the toilet is an act of active citizenship now – the sewage from her flat is treated and used to grow gardens that cool the building and provide food to its occupants. Her breakfast has locally grown veggies and a yeast-stake – a new fad that has yeast strains mimicking the taste and nutrition of meat. So few eat meat now – there is no need. She walks down to the bus station in the pathway that was recently modified. It’s covered to protect from the heat, but the cover is made of solar panels that help power the bus station that won the city’s Form-Function award last year. It has ceiling covered with new flexible, colourful solar panels mimicking a fish; mood music, performance spaces – it really perks one up! The bus arrives – Sunita settles into her seat: she can customise the seat colour, check the news, get a massage. If she were in a more social mood, she could head upstairs to the coffee club on the upper deck.

The news today is all about the anniversary of the Climate Adapt Bill passed in 2025 – the one that completely revamped how everyone lived, with fully priced water, heat adaptation, smart city design and a complete overhaul of the education system. Within five years, the effects were felt – there was weather-proofed farming, for starters. The smart city program overhauled the infrastructure and the revamped education system allowed rural youth to play a big role. The city kept changing and improving. This month it was the platform. Last year it was the bus station. It’s hotter now, true and some parts of old Chennai, especially near the beach are not liveable. But most of the power now is drawn from Carbon-free sources, so the CO2 levels in the air actually has been falling for the past 5 years. By recognizing the threat and adapting, there is not just hope but renewed energy that makes for an exciting new world.

It's 2050: Prakash joins a long line outside the ration shop. The smart ones begin to stand by 8 pm, when the heat is a touch lower. They removed all shelter outside the shop to discourage people from coming, but the people still came and fainted when it got too hot. The crops have failed…again. Water could never be priced they said, so people used it carelessly until it ran out. The rivers flowed differently today as well – much less water. People began to move from the fields to the cities until the slums overflowed. There too, water ran out as the drills ran ever deeper and people built slums over ponds.

For the rich, apart from the threat of disease and sporadic violence, it’s not so bad. They have cooling. They have access to cheap labour. But there is a simmering, something has to give. And when it does…

If only…20 years ago, he was a young boy, and heard talk of people marching to take action. The rest put them down, saying no action was necessary, it was too expensive, what can a few of us do. If only…they had taken action.

Two roads are diverging before us now. We can choose to be ostriches, hiding our heads under the sand and hoping business as usual continues. Or we can choose to act.

The most impactful individual action would be to watch what we eat and cut down our consumption of milk and meat. Be mindful of food waste and of the need to quickly adapt our plants to a rapidly heating environment. Agriculture uses 75% of our water and ruminants like cows cause twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as our transportation sector in India. We waste/lose a substantial portion of our food from farm-to-table. This action is a no-brainer. As is switching to LED lighting or energy efficient appliances. Enabling a Bus Rapid Transit System for our cities is a little harder – we need the discipline, but a climate-friendly escape from our torturous daily commute is worth the effort.

The next big action would be to manage our waste – segregate, compost and repurpose it – to prevent it from clogging up our waterways and water bodies. Because flooding that is likely to increase in our cities, and managing our waste is a key step to reduce our vulnerability. We should learn from the success of others – Israel or Singapore – who have learned to treat and reuse their sewage and price water – allowing them to thrive.

The Earth we rest on, who we draw from, has limits. And we are nearing or passing those limits.
Let us Act. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?