HOT SUMMER DAYS ARE BACK

                                                   HOT SUMMER DAYS ARE BACK

                                                                                                                Nikunja Bihari Sahu

   The summer in our childhood village days in Odisha used to be pleasant and memorable.  The cool refreshing southerly breezes of the evening, the cuckoo’s melodious song in the meadows, cricket’s melancholy tunes reverberating the quiet afternoon hours, the fragrance of mango buds swept away by the winds and people enjoying playing cards under moon-lit sky till late night - all revive the sweet memories of the ancient village life. These are now missing with scortchy and harsh summers making outdoor life unbearable. This year, at the onset of the Summer month of Baisakh, temperature soared to over 40 degrees Celsius in most parts of the state promising a painful summer ahead. Last year also, extreme and prolonged heat wave conditions swept across the whole world starting from Japan in the east to the USA and Canada in the west encompassing  Southern Europe, and North Africa breaking all previous temperature records with temperatures in some parts of the world reaching as high as 47 degrees Celsius.

    Global Warming, which is emerging as perhaps the greatest environmental challenge of the twenty-first century, accounts for most temperature rises across the globe . According to IPCC, our planet has warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last century and it is projected that the Earth’s mean temperature is likely to rise  2.4 to 4.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.

       This has brought about drastic consequences some of which are already becoming visible: melting of glaciers and rising of sea level, change in precipitation patterns, untimely monsoon onsets, increase in extreme weather conditions of floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes and long term effects like lowering of agricultural yields, species extinction, increase of vector-borne diseases like Dengue and Malaria, social conflicts over issues like water etc.  One of the recent examples was Dubai, a state traditionally known for its dry and desertic climate, has been witness to severe flooding due to heavy rains  paralyzing its infrastructure.

This bizarre effect has gravely affected the lives and livelihoods of people around  the world. People in the Maldives worry about relocating their families due to the sea level rise,  farmers in Kansas struggle for bread as prolonged periods of drought ravaged their crops,  fishermen in the Niger river wonder why their fishing nets gone empty,  children in New Jersey worry how they  lost their homes to a super-storm and  women in Bangladesh struggled to  get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones: these are few of the enormously many victims of global warming. Even animals are not spared from the wrath of this human induced fury. The Polar bear in the melting ice sheets of the Arctic, the Royal Bengal tigers in India’s fragile mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, the Right whale in the plankton-poor waters of the warming North Atlantic and the Orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by frequent bushfires and droughts are some of the survivors of this tell-tale story.

 Intense heat waves in 2003 took a toll of around 35,000 people in the whole of Europe including 15,000 lives in France alone. About 700 million people in India depending directly on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forests and fisheries for their livelihood will directly face the brunt of the consequences of climate change induced by global warming.             Global warming has proved to be very harsh to our state Odisha also. Low pressure weather conditions and depressions are becoming regular incidents causing unpredictable rainfall patterns across the state much to the woes of  farmers. Rivers, which are the lifeline of the State’ s agriculture , have gone dry. Who can forget the scorching hot summer days of 1998 when hundreds of people died of heatwave  incidents and also the devastating Super cyclone of 1999 that claimed thousands of lives in coastal Odisha. Frequent floods and famines in the following years battered the lives of the people and shattered the economy of the state. The sea has also posed a serious threat to the state. The Bay of Bengal is advancing towards the coastal landscape at an alarming rate taking many villages and farmlands into its grip thereby seriously threatening the livelihood of the native villagers.

 The world must take urgent action to cut down greenhouse gas emissions, which are the major culprit of global warming. While Carbon dioxide, a potential greenhouse gas, increased dramatically in our atmosphere by 11% since the Industrial revolution, Methane accounts for a whopping 149% rise.

       Keeping these grave consequences in mind, world leaders have met at several forums in  past to find a solution to the menace with the Rio Summit in 1992 serving as the launching pad.  The Kyoto protocol of 1995, the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, the Paris Agreement of 2015, the Glasgow Climate Pact of 2021 and the Dubai climate summit of 2023  have all failed to deliver any tangible result due to the non cooperation of industrial nations to cut down their emission rates. The world must find an immediate and appropriate solution to this problem to bring back the lost summer days with singing cuckoos and dancing crickets!

Nikunja Bihari Sahu

Education Officer

Regional Science Centre

Shyamla Hills

Bhopal

 

 To read the same article published in The Orissa  Post dated 03.05.24, pl click the following link :

https://odishapostepaper.com/m/237020/6633efe30b9ee

or

https://tinyurl.com/Summer-Article

To read the same article published in The Central Chronicle dated 31.05.24, please click the following link :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PZtf4JV6SZeCFrP5WkVl6wiKSjwGMqMI/view?usp=sharing