It appears innocuous enough when the phone app says the temperature is around 34 Celsius , iun the evening that is. It is after getting into more expansive parts of the drop down menu that you see the Real Feel temperature, which records almost 10 degrees more than the traditional reading of the mercury.
Humidity, Sun intensity, cloud cover and such are factored into determining Real Feel. It reveals Chennai is blazing hot, not only in summer days but summer evenings too and it’s not as if we are feeling the heat more because we are all getting older.
The rise in ambient temperatures can be put down to many factors like our roads being of black tar and our buildings and their roofs not painted white. By changing a few of those things we can minimise the summer heat, but these are mitigating factors that can only help a bit in dealing with the urban heat island effect. As the megalopolises of the world grow, they will be less liveable, particularly in the heat of summers. Beyond being trapped in a city, what we are facing everywhere is the effect of global warming. But don’t tell Donald Trump that because he doesn’t know yet.
We are facing the most deleterious effect of global warming in our deficit rainfall as successive monsoons have been failing and none can help us there. While extreme events like excessive rainfall in patches are becoming more common, the commonplace events like normal monsoons have become rarer.
To deny global warming is causing all this is to close your mind to the observations of the scientific process. Given their predilections towards certain pathways of thinking, people like Trump can afford to deny climate change. If you and I did denied climate change, it would do no harm to the planet. When Trump is led to believe this, the results can be catastrophic.
The deniers of climate science may like to consider the following – A study showed that record hot years on the planet would have been impossible without manmade climate change. Calculations show there is just a 0.01% chance that recent run of global heat records could have happened due to natural climate variations. Unprecedented local heat waves across the world have resulted in loss of life and aggravated droughts and wildfires. The risk of heat extremes has been multiplied due to our interference with the Earth system. Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record have all occurred since the turn of the millennium.
It must be a sobering thought that in the history of the planet we have been most responsible for reaching the threshold of 1 degree C above pre-industrial temperatures. Human beings are the main cause of global warming, but don’t tell Trump, he doesn’t know yet. If we let the moment pass without a thought of aggressive corrective action we are all doomed. Fanciful thoughts of inter-planetary travel to preserve humanity are not anymore the preserve of science fiction and Hollywood script writers. Stephen Hawking thinks so too. There is little chance though that any of us, including Donald Trump, will be chosen for that journey to save the human race.
We must do something about this is before space colonisation becomes inevitable. Saving the Earth may just be possible if the Paris deal were to be considered the Holy Grail and all the 190-odd countries which have signed the Agreement stick to the fundamental ideas of reducing greenhouse gases. For argument’s sake, it can be said that China and India cannot afford to switch off the coal-fired thermal power plants because more than 500 millions of its citizens are still without electricity. It can also be argued that the USA and the western world sacrificed the world’s atmosphere in the days of the Industrial Revolution by burning whatever they could get hold of for power.
How do we justify to the world today that the USA, historically the biggest polluter, is reneging on its responsibility while blaming India and China for aspiring to catch up with the first world in giving a life for its citizens? It’s nice to tell his home audience that the US has been ripped off by the Paris deal, vilifying it while ignoring its good intentions and its largely nonbinding provisions. We see in this nothing but Trumpism in all its glory. It portrays the rest of the world as conspirators against the superpower because it generates a quarter of the global GDP and holds 40 per cent of the universal wealth which is in the hands of individuals. Trump appears to be cocking a snook at the rest of the world and the US is applauding. But whose planet is this and who polluted it all these years? These are not questions the US President may feel qualified to answer at the moment.
