The Hindu Business Line : Keeping cool

THE leaders of nations are always comfortable in tackling the familiar and easy items on the anti-terror agenda such as invading the privacy of individuals, incarcerating so-called suspects so on. However, no politician is worried when it comes to providing protection against the imminent threat of climate change.

Earlier this week, scientists reported that combating global warming is more urgent than thought of until now as measurements of carbon di-oxide, a greenhouse gas, taken from the Mauna Loa Observatory, 12,000ft up a mountain in Hawaii, suggest atmospheric carbon di-oxide levels have risen sharply and inexplicably in the past two years, prompting fears of runaway global warming.

Though climatologists are hesitant to confirm that it is a definite upward trend, no doubt it came as an unwelcome surprise.

Even lay persons and certainly those who saw the movie The Day after Tomorrow are alive to the possibilities of unforeseen and catastrophic changes in climate resulting in hurricanes, flooding and freezing. Climatologists now fear most the twin effects melting ice and methane belch. Yet the precise details of how they will happen is, frankly, unknown.

With global warming, there will be a dramatic change of colours in geography text books as Sahara will turn from brown to green, Amazon rain forests from lively greenish black to deathly brown, Tibetan plateau from coruscating white to brown and grey and Greenland and Antarctic from diamond like icy blue and white to a dreadful deep blue or black. The disrupting processes will centre around ocean currents. It is feared that the Sahara desert will turn green with the flourish of vegetation, may be good for the locals, but will choke the food chain for plankton and other marine life in the Atlantic ocean. Less life in the ocean means more carbon di-oxide into the atmosphere. The fear of a devastating release of methane from deep within the Siberian permafrost and ocean floor sediments which contain vast deposits of gas-filled ice called methane clathrates is too real to be discounted. If let into the atmosphere, it could exacerbate global warming by up to 25 per cent.

Except to the megalomaniacs, redoubling efforts by all nations in finding fast ways to avert the threat of global warming should be a greater priority than taking any other grandiose establishment of strategic missile defence systems.

More Stories on : Environment | Impressions

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Empty gift

Telecom: Barriers beyond the FDI cap

Competition, regulation must work for user

China's transition: From Marx to Deng

Keeping cool

Public-private partnership — The road to infrastructure

Fiscal sickness

Small coins