Climate crisis plays out in heat waves and torrential rain

Heat waves, torrential rain that beat down in different countries from floods in South Korea and North India, to heat waves in China from Beijing to Xinjiang, to forest fires in Greece and rising temperatures in California in the United States show that the destructive effects of climate change are showing up clearly and forcefully everywhere even as the governments in the world are dragging their feet to formulate a common response.

US climate envoy John Kerry met Chinese leaders arguing the need for a common response even as the Conference of Parties 28 (COP28) in November in Dubai looms large on the horizon. Kerry told Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on Wednesday, “It is a universal threat to everybody on the planet and requires the largest nations in the world, the largest economies in the world, the largest emitters in the world, to come together in order to work not just for ourselves, but for all mankind.”

These are indeed noble sentiments but they do not mean much if no action plan is in place. There is a lot that America needs to on the emission front, as well as on contributing to finance the climate fund that will aid poor countries to make the transition to greener energy systems. Europe, which includes the advanced industrialised countries and which contribute to the global emissions, are willing to take care of their own by creating strict environmental laws, but they also break them when energy crisis arises with the disruption of Russian gas supply. The two other large economies of Asia, China and India, are arguing that it is the Western industrialised countries which had contributed the greatest to the climate crisis, and that they should help financially the developing countries to cope with the challenge of climate change.

What seems to be lacking is a concrete plan to fend off the climate crisis. What the climate experts are recommending is that the global temperature must not rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But no plans are in place to meet the target. There is the general talk about restricting fossil fuel consumption and therefore of CO2 emissions, but the actual mathematics involved in this target is missing.

In the meanwhile, there has also been a suggestion of adaptability, how countries and people must prepare to take appropriate measures to protect themselves from the rise in temperature. What we are witnessing now as a result of the climate crisis is extreme weather events – excess heat, excess rain and excess cold. It is more than rise in temperatures and therefore the dangers of diminishing rainfall, drought drying up of rivers.

The effects of climate change appear to be more diverse. It looks like that while policy-makers are slow in their response, the experts appear to be not accurate enough about the actual consequences of the climate crisis. This is due to the fact that while there is a general understanding, which is right, that the climatic conditions which allow human societies to flourish seem to be flipping, posing a threat to human wellbeing and even survival, there is as yet no detailed picture of the sequence of events that follow climatic changes. It can be argued that with our present state of knowledge, it will not be possible to anticipate the exact consequences. The solutions offered so far like cutting down on fossil fuel consumption and replacing it with renewable energy sources sound sensible enough, but the details of the plan of implementing the plan are missing.

For example, there is no estimate of how much solar energy is to be generated to replace energy consumed through fossil fuels. Without exact targets, the rigour of responding to the rise in global temperature cannot be done effectively.