Global warming is a serious problem, but to put all our eggs in the carbon bucket would be foolhardy, especially after two decades of all talk and little action, says Utpal Kumar

More than 1,600 people die in Pakistan's catastrophic floods, which have already affected as many as 12 million people and damaged over 600,000 homes — ironically, the monsoon season is only half-way through. Flood-related incidents in China this year claim nearly 4,000 lives, even as Beijing continues to struggle with rising waters along the Korean borders. Russia witnesses an unbearable temperature of 38 degree Celsius — the highest since records began 130 years ago — leading to scores of summer deaths and, of course, deadly wildfires. New York bakes in a thick tropical heat and humidity, as people line up to buy ACs and coolers. Back home, cataclysmic mud flow strikes Leh, killing more than 160 people.



Seemingly disconnected, most environmentalists attribute these events to global warming, caused mostly by human excesses. They say the earth has begun to sizzle as rising levels of greenhouse gases trap more and more of the sun's heat in the lower atmosphere. Their contention seemed to have been vindicated recently when sensors from across the world showed that 2010 could end up becoming the hottest year on record.



The global warming phenomenon, according to them, leads to increase in average air and ocean temperatures, melting of snow and ice, and rising sea levels. They also cite a large body of evidence to suggest that climate change increases the number of heatwaves and make them longer. Since 1880, for instance, heatwaves across Europe have doubled, and are expected to increase five-fold by 2100. Temperatures have also risen by 0.74 degree Celsius in the last century. Though the increase may seem insignificant, it needs to be understood that the difference in temperature between the Ice Age and today is a mere five degree Celsius.



For these environmentalists, the problem began with the Industrial Revolution, which enabled us to use in a big way what energy expert Rochelle Lefkowitz calls "fuels from hell" — coal, oil and natural gas. These fuels come from underground, are exhaustible, emit carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants, and are in sharp contrast to what Lefkowitz calls "fuels from heaven" — wind, hydroelectric, tidal, biomass, and solar power. The latter come from above ground, are renewable, and produce no harmful emissions.



The Industrial Revolution led to urbanisation, which in turn paved the way for mindless consumption of energy. From four cities with a population of over a million in 1850 to more than 300 now, the human civilisation has come a long way. And, with this has increased our insatiable apatite for energy. If legendary Indian nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha is to be believed, half of all the energy consumed in the past 2,000 years has been used in the past 100 years. So, it all turned into a vicious cycle of more people, more development, more buildings and more cars, and thus the need for more coal, oil, and gas to build and power them.



There are, however, others who blame the sun, and not CO2, for global warming. They say that the 4.5 billion-year-old earth has gone through a succession of ice ages and warming periods, and that the medieval world was warm by up to three degree Celsius. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today, they are there. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now, they are under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole, so much so that a Chinese naval squadron could sail right round the Arctic in 1421; today, it is all frozen. Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, supports their claims when he says that in the past 50 years the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in the past 11,400 years.



There is no doubt that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past 100 years — from about 280 parts per million to 380. The critics, however, say that the CO2 level some 80 million years ago was at least 1,000 parts per million. So, the changes don't necessarily mirror human activity.



They also believe that any overemphasis on CO2 is misplaced. "CO2 is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapour," says Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. Incidentally, current climate models don't know how to handle water vapour.



Citing the Pakistan floods, these critics say, they are less the work of climate change, and more due to the fact that only 5.2 per cent of land in that country is covered by forests. Sarhad Awami Forestry Ittehad, a local NGO, has claimed that in parts of Malakand Agency, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, "more than 70 per cent of forests were illegally cut down between 2007 and 2009, when Pakistani Taliban controlled the region". The situation is worse is Sindh where forests cover only 2.3 per cent of the total land area. Another report in The Guardian claims that the flooding has been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active. It states that the felled trees stacked in ravines for the purpose of smuggling were dislodged by the force of water, thus sweeping away bridges, people and weakening the dam walls along its way.



While taking on the 'traditionalists', these critics look at geophysical phenomenon — volcanoes, sunspots, etc — for understanding the intricacies of climate change. In fact, the connection between volcanoes and climate is hardly a new idea. Anthropologist Stanley Ambrose has argued that about 70,000 years ago a super-volcanic explosion took place at Sumatra's Lake Toba which completely blocked the sun, triggering an Ice Age. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote about volcanic eruptions in Iceland that had caused a particularly harsh winter and cool summer with "constant fog over all Europe and (a) greater part of North America". Also, the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia produced 'The Year Without a Summer' in 1815.



What distinguishes a "big-ass volcano" — a term given by Myhrvold — isn't just how much stuff it throws out, but where the matter goes. A typical volcano ejaculates sulfur dioxide into the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the earth's surface, which soon falls back to the surface as acid rain. But big volcanoes throw sulfur dioxide higher into the stratosphere which, rather than quickly returning to the earth's surface, absorbs stratospheric water vapour and forms an aerosol cloud that blankets most of the planet, thereby cooling the atmosphere. Even Paul Crutzen, a Dutch scientist who won a Nobel Prize for his research on atmospheric ozone depletion, in his essay in journal Climate Change in 2006, acknowledged that an injection of sulfur in the stratosphere "is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects". He said so while lamenting our "grossly unsuccessful" efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases.



So, the 'heretics' have a solution: Put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, and the world will be a cooler place to live in, though how to do so remains debatable. Their primary contention is that as we have miserably failed to control the release of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we need to have an alternative plan in place.



The climate science establishment, dominated by traditionalists, however, refused to accommodate dissent. Even Michael Crichton's novel, State of Fear, based on the story of a high-profile NGO hyping the science of global warming to further the ends of evil eco-terrorists, failed to provide any academic foothold to their theories. But then, in 2009, 'climategate' broke out, and people started questioning the very 'prophets of doom', turning State of Fear into the gospel of truth. People found similarity between the fictional National Environmental Resource Fund and the real Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charged with cornering millions of dollars in the name of climate research.



'Climategate' not only boosted the prospect of these critics, but also, ironically, discredited the global warming issue. A Pew survey said that the number of Americans who regarded global warming as "a very serious problem" had declined from 44 per cent in April 2008 to 35 per cent last October. A recent BBC study, too, found a similar trend in Britain, where the support for the issue plummeted from 41 per cent in November 2009 to 26 per cent. And in Germany, Der Spiegel magazine reported that only 42 per cent feared global warming, compared with 62 per cent in 2006.



A fatalistic trend it might seem, but it was expected after 20 years of all talk and little action on global warming. How can this be reversed? For this, we need to adopt a two-pronged approach. First, the climate change establishment must get rid of people like Al Gore who have made a lucrative business out of scare stories. No doubt, a startling statistic makes us sit down and listen, but it also turns us thick-skinned, thus requiring ever more outrageous scenarios to move us. Also, such stories are more likely to fall flat for their exaggerated, outlandish claims. This was recently seen in the IPCC's audacious prediction that by 2035 all the Himalayan glaciers would vanish!



Once the systemic rot is cleaned, then the focus must shift to the real problem — global warming. Herein we must first analyse why the greenhouse formula has over the years turned into a 'Clean Ganga' project — the more you clean, the dirtier it becomes. Thereafter, we should look for an alternative mode of curbing global warming: If the carbon formula doesn't work, give sulfur a chance! At least we should see whether it's a feasible idea or not. Also, we must adopt green lifestyle, technology and policies. Warming or no warming, there's no alternative to trees, as has recently been seen in Pakistan.



Global warming has, of late, become an easy excuse for anything wrong happening in the world. Let's take an example. If we face water scarcity in some parts of the country, we instantly blame climate change for it. Such things used to happen in the past as well, but then we had a rich tradition of water harvesting. We knew water needed to be preserved for hard times. But when the British came, they told us it was the work of the mai-baap Government, and not society, to preserve and provide water. We, therefore, abdicated our responsibility — first reluctantly, then happily. The professional mourners need to understand that of all the countries in the world, India gets the most rainfall per square unit of land area. And, if the country is walled and no rainwater is allowed to escape into the sea, we would have water one metre deep on the ground every year!



This, however, doesn't mean global warming isn't a serious issue. The basic premise of this writer is that we should stop being alarmist. At the same time, we need to go green, turn traditional in water harvesting and, of course, look for an alternative mode of curbing global warming. For me, if carbon can't do the tricks, let sulfur do it.


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