Climate change, anyone?

 

I’ve been bingeing on climate shows lately. No surprise, given the recent COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. It’s the topic du jour.

I learned something interesting. People living in tightly packed houses with air-conditioners are creating furnace-like conditions for their neighbours through the emission of hot air by their aircon units.

Please check where the hot air exhaust from your aircon unit is going. If it’s blowing at somebody’s house nearby, please make some adjustment to direct the hot air elsewhere. Otherwise, neighbours who can’t afford aircon may direct their toilet exhaust fans into your house, and you can’t really complain.

Care and consideration for others are quite high up among the many adjustments needed to survive our changing climate.

Years ago, we used to call this big climate problem global warming. Many denied it then, but the numbers don’t lie: they show how increasingly hot things have become. I don’t think anybody denies it now.

What deniers do now is deny that the change is caused by humans; they cite kooky theories about a mini ice age (or not) and solar cycles (or not) as reasons for the changing climate, in spite of the clear science that says otherwise.

Or, the kookiest of all is their belief that all this is scaremongering by scientists driven by money and big businesses. The fact that most of the power and money actually belong to the big fossil fuel companies and not universities or sustainable technology start-ups seem lost on them.

The powerful and the ignorant

There are two types of powerful people who are not doing enough to help save us against the climate change catastrophe. One type controls the powerful economic levers, to whom anything that reduces business growth is anathema to their version of what life should be.

These people run powerful entities – companies, and even nations. Many even know the real situation as they have smart advisers telling them the facts, but for them, current wealth and power are more important than future safety and survival.

The other type are just the clueless people who landed in positions of power and influence through the lottery of politics. Here it gets really scary where power is married to ignorance and obtuseness.

These people, as well as other well-meaning ones, may ask what’s the big deal about a rise of a degree or two of the earth’s average temperature? The clue is in the word “average”.

Hot stuff

Right now, the oceans, which are slowly heating up (and turning more acidic too) absorb around an amount of energy equivalent to five Hiroshima-size atomic bombs from the atmosphere…every second!

Imagine that amount of energy, equivalent to thousands of tons of TNT, multiplied by five bombs per second, multiplied by the number of seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years since this started, yet only raising the average temperature by a degree or two.

What this means is even though the ocean has warmed by a degree or so, it now contains a bazillion gazillion zamillion (these units are not in your secondary school physics books) units of extra energy that does what energy does – make things happen.

That energy in the ocean gets converted to other things. These other “things” include rising sea levels, more frequent and severe storms, harsher droughts, melting of glaciers and changes to the earth’s weather system.

While on the one hand it shows how resilient nature is, being able to absorb so much energy without collapsing, it also shows undoing this phenomenon is next to impossible. And that’s even before tipping points and positive feedback loops accelerate this one-way journey.

What we can expect

Some of what will happen may be good … more land becomes arable because of shifting rainfall patterns, new sea routes being opened, etc. But what nature giveth, nature taketh away. The net result is a shift in the balance of nature which is harmful to us humans.

Here’s another perspective that should concern you: an average rise of half a degree in our climate can, and often does, mean summers which are 10° hotter accompanied by winters which are 9° colder.

So apart from the energy stored by the average rise in temperature, the higher peaks and lower troughs of the seasonal temperatures now create fires and storms and droughts and floods that kill crops and animals and of course, humans too.

On a personal level I’m glad I won’t have to face the incredibly dire effect of a warming earth. But I have children who’ll have to face it and all its deadly consequences. And their children, should they choose to have any, will have an even more damaged world to inherit.

Who’s at fault?

I blame the big developed countries for sure. About 30% of the carbon already in the atmosphere came from the US over the last couple of centuries, even if they aren’t even 5% of the world population. Europe as a continent is probably guilty to that extent too, if not even more.

And yet they’re not doing 30% of the mitigation or 30% of the funding to help solve this mess that they created. And they, especially the US, are still galloping ahead with new emission of greenhouse gases.

If there’s any improvement at all, it’s because they’ve outsourced the worst of their problems, such as dirty manufacturing jobs, to China and India and other developing countries. If they were to take back these jobs, they wouldn’t like the impact on their environment and natural resources.

Next time you’re in a developed country and admire their vast and neat farmlands and contrast that with the unmitigated disaster of us stripping our own jungles for agriculture, remember those farmlands used to be virgin jungles hundreds of years ago.

Nicely managing them to be picture-perfect doesn’t take away their role in destroying jungles and forests to plant crops that made them wealthy and powerful. While we need to stop chopping our forests, they need to regrow much of their forests too.

I can understand countries like China and India needing some leeway as they raise their population out of poverty. Energy will be the most critical contribution to any such efforts.

Yet, the recently-concluded COP26 climate conference showed China and India are not quite as proactive as they claim to be. For them, the need to keep their population satiated with the goodies of modern life, and hence maintain political control over them, trumps everything else.

Yet they’re also the countries who’ll suffer horribly when the full effect of climate change comes home to roost.

Living in la-la-land

Which brings us back to Malaysia.

Apart from the usual greenwashing by the largest corporations, I don’t see any real effort by anybody to help us fend off the impending disaster.

I don’t see our meteorological department talking about the changes happening to our weather, our university professors explaining to us the changes and impacts and what we can do, or our environmental enforcers making the guilty culprits pay.

At the highest levels of our politics, it’s even worse. You hear nothing from them, assuming they even understand anything about this at all.

We are happily living in la-la-land, manufacturing issues and crises while willfully ignoring the real danger to our existence. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.