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From The Wire: The SAPACC campaign rests on two pillars: climate science and mass mobilisation. Large organisations coming together on an issue considered too abstract for a movement only a few years ago is a significant shift. It reflects the climate’s intensifying impact in South-Asia and how the issue has exploded in the public consciousness.
When a group of us visited Boatkhali Kadambini Primary School four years ago, classes were on in full swing. This primary school is at one edge of Sagar island in the Sunderbans. That entire stretch, including the Boatkhali school, has now been swallowed up by the sea, including the house in which we had stayed.
From The Wire: The recent hurricanes have made some raise an obvious question: to what extent does global warming have a role to play? To which I would add one voiced less frequently: why should those least responsible for global warming have to constantly face its effects? And what does it bode for the future?
From Jacobin Magazine: Increasingly, extreme weather events including the annual floods are being recognized as the new normal. Less commonly noted is how this “new normal” tends to disproportionately hit the underclasses—the urban poor, agriculturalists, coastal communities, and poor women. In short, the greatest victims of global warming will be those least responsible for it.
In West Antarctica, a huge ice shelf called Larsen C has developed a rift 175 kilometres long and half-a-kilometre wide, which could soon set loose an iceberg the size of Haryana, at over 5,000 sq. km. We need to pay more attention because it could potentially gravely impact India in the near and long term.
Nagraj Adve writes: In any economy primed to continuously expand, technological improvements alone can only help so much. While being stunned by Trump’s victory, let’s neither underestimate nor render invisible the inherent, long-term economic tendencies that prevent greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide from declining as the science demands they should. In fact, they may well rise again.
The agreement has been welcomed because it would slow down what many fear would be an exponential rise in the greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons, what with the increased use of refrigerators, ACs and cars in China and India in the years to come. But, IPCC data suggests we need to keep our excitement in check.
According to an authoritative new report, some of the heat that accumulates in oceans over the years can get released back to the atmosphere. In a nutshell, the oceans were behaving less like heat sponges over the last year or more, instead releasing heat to the surface, and hence the spike in average global temperatures.
Deaths due to heat waves in India have been in the thousands–in the years 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2015 in particular. Numbers, which are how the deaths are usually reported, are class- and gender-neutral. It’s one of the grave ironies of global warming that those least responsible for it are affected the most by it.
If any of us have fixed geographical notions of the nation-state, the rise and fall of sea levels everywhere ought to give us pause. Not just in warnings about the future, but also lessons from the past. Once, England and France were contiguous landmass… our borders are drawn not by us, but by the oceans.
The figure quoted most often in climate change literature is a further warming of 0.6 ºC. This is unavoidable warming-in-the-pipeline, over and above the 1ºC rise the world has touched in 2015. This is not to minimise the political significance of the demand of 1.5 ºC, but to point out that it has already been breached.
Chennai experienced exceptionally heavy rainfall in 1969, 1976, 1985, 1996, 1998, 2005 and now in 2015. Even a decadal frequency is higher than the occurrence of extreme rain events in the first half of the 20th century. It’s likely that at least some of these six extreme rain events had the fingerprint of climate change.
These migrants need attention, too When species shift northward or higher, not all in an ecosystem may move, disrupting the interconnectedness that has evolved over decades Nagraj Adve, The Hindu Our fish are moving north. Until about the mid-1980s, important fish species such as mackerel and oil sardines used to be present no further north
