EVERY now and then, a report is published on climate change which casts profound gloom. However, what is stressed is that urgent action is necessary to cope with the crisis. Public panic leads governments to toy with the idea of cutting emissions for some time but then it is back to square one. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released a report putting together the UN panel’s three major reports on global warming in a nutshell. It warns that climate change will have severe, widespread and irreversible impact on people. India is among the twenty most vulnerable countries. The report says that emissions have to be cut by 40/70% by 2050 to maintain global warming at under two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial level. Otherwise the consequences will be cataclysmic affecting vital areas such as frequent crop failures, deadly heat waves and water shortages. The IPCC urges action at this critical moment with the UN sponsored Lima round of negotiations come December. In 2015, a global confluence will be held in Paris. It is time a global deal was cut replacing the Kyoto Protocol. All previous attempts have failed due to political hitches. The snag is how to divide the burden of action between developed and developing nations. Mitigation efforts have been set at naught by the demand for equity and development priorities in India, China and the like.
The IPCC holds that necessary reduction in fossil fuel use and switchover to renewals are technologically and economically feasible. But there are political hindrances. Climate change has already darkened the global scenario and the sooner the problem is solved, the better.
