[Reader-list] Global Warming

[Rakesh Iyer]

Dear all

I felt in all this mix of issues about identity and religion and rest,
somewhere global warming seems to have been lost. What we forget is that the
Kashmiri Pandits can think of getting back to their homes, the Muslims of
post-Godhra violence can get back their justice, and other things can also
be dealt with, if we all actually survive at all. And global warming is one
of the dangers pointing to the fact that we may not do so.

Not to minimize the importance of issues of the rights of the Pandits or the
Muslims or others, but I believe on it's own it is a serious issue and
really something we have to act against right now, to save our planet Earth
from all that is happening, the cyclones, the floods, the terrible
devastation on large scale, the changing climate patterns and other ordeals
we all are going through.

I present here an article by Shri Gopal Krishna Gandhi, the Governor of
Bengal, someone I like very much for his views (and so do the Bengalis, for
the way he speaks out against atrocities, and is with the common people, be
it Nandigram, Singur or those affected by Cyclone Alia in the Sunderbans).
Hope you all read and enjoy it, and try to do something which can contribute
to this movement.

Regards

Rakesh

Article:

*Deaf To The Countdown *

* How long can we live in denial of imminent annihilation?*

 GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI

Newspapers recently carried an artist's vivid imaging of a collision of
Earth and Mars that is supposed to take place some three billion years from
now. As I was pondering over the image of the two planets melting into each
other, I was reminded of a conversation—a real, not an imaginary one—between
an astronomy teacher and his student. The teacher had suggested that the sun
and the earth were slowly, but ever so steadily, moving towards each other.
He said our planet, a few billion years from now, will therefore burn into a
plume of vapour. The student then asked, anxiety writ all over him, "How
many billion years would that take?" The teacher said, "About six billion."
"Oh!" breathed the student in relief, "that's alright then. I thought it was
three billion." Ours has to be the age of denial.

Natural hazards like asteroid impacts and earthquakes also perform the role
of the astronomy teacher. They alert us to the laws and procedures of Planet
Earth. The unmistakable signs of climate change are also our teacher. They
warn us of what lies ahead. But unlike the earth-sun approximation, the
multiple shocks created by climate change are not going to wait for six
billion years. They are not going to wait 600 years; not even six decades.
If you have seen pictures taken even five years ago of Antarctica, of
Gaumukh, or of Ghoramara islet in the Sunderbans, and you see those
formations now, you will know what I mean. Global warming and the rising
mean sea level are changing the face of the earth. West Bengal's riverbanks
and estuaries, where land crumbles like a biscuit into a coffee cup, show
this phenomenon dramatically.

And on the same Faculty of Reminders of Grim Prognoses are Dr Terror and
Professor Error—bio-terror, bio-error, chemical terror, chemical error,
nuclear terror, nuclear error. And then there are possible nano
catastrophes. The twins of terror and error—biological, chemical and
nuclear—belong not just to the realm of the possible but, let us be strong
enough to admit, to that of the highly probable. These are all around us and
can come face to face with us at any moment, including this one. Or the
next. 'Devices' falling into non-state hands is a probability that should
make us all more than concerned. Installations going wrong, or their safety
systems going to sleep, too, are real fears. Human society in general is
like the astronomy student, seeking refuge in the comfortable illusion that
these risks, though real, are still far from us in time and in space. Ours
has to be the age of denial.

Any one of the risks I have mentioned can disfigure life, even make it
disappear. And to these risks is now added climate change, man-propelled,
though working through the instrumentation of 'natural' phenomena. Lord
Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of England, who is really a
philosopher-astrophysicist, has said with compelling and persuasive
seriousness, in his gripping book *The Final Century*, that taking all
risks—including the risks inherent in science experiments—into account, the
chances of human life surviving this century are 50:50. *Wired* magazine
carried a series of "long bets" in 2002 about future predictions in society,
science and technology. Lord Rees staked one thousand dollars on the bet:
"That by the year 2020 an instance of bio-error or bio-terror will have
killed a million people." He says he fervently hopes to lose the bet, but
honestly does not expect to.

"Twenty-twenty" is a mere 11 years away. The end of this century is just
nine decades away. Will our grandchildren and our great grandchildren see
it? We have no reason to feel assured. We have every reason to worry. And
great need, an existential need, in fact, to act. And yet, far from worrying
and very far from acting, we are in denial.

Scientists, like statesmen, have been agents of change. They have changed
things by what they have understood and explained, but most significantly,
they have changed things by what they have done. They have sometimes changed
so much and so fast that they have had to run behind some of their own
creations to say, "Stop! I did not mean to unleash you like that!"

At Los Alamos, in 1945, as he saw the explosion illumine, intensify, pummel,
roll, liquefy and gasify the landscape before his eyes, Oppenheimer invoked
the *Bhagavad Gita*, as we all know, in its description of "all-devouring
death". The 1955 manifesto on the nuclear peril prepared by Bertrand Russell
and signed, among others, by Einstein, in one of his "last acts", deserves
to be known as much as Lincoln's Gettysburg address for its calm
determination, or Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" for its sense of
immediacy. The authors say in that profound document that they are
"speaking...not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but
as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in
doubt". Today doubt assails us not just about the nuclear peril but about a
great many other perils as well, perils that have swollen to monstrous
dimensions by man's actions over the last 100 years or so.

Many of you have, I am sure, read Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's fascinating
novel *The Leopard*, a universal and timeless story. In it, Tancredi says
about the Sicilian Prince of Salina, "If we want things to stay as they are,
things will have to change." To "stay as they are", to "stay as we are" or,
in simple words, to survive, even up to 2020, things will have to change.
But—and this BUT is all in capital letters—things will have to change not in
the way they have been changing; things will have to change very, very
differently.

Scientists and statesmen have, as I said, been able to change. But now they
face a choice—not between being 'changers' or 'no-changers', not between
so-called 'progress' and so-called 'status quo', but a choice between the
same kind of change and a new kind of change. They face what can only be
called the task of changing change itself, the direction of change, the aim
of change and, indeed, the nature of change. And, borrowing from the 1955
manifesto, they need to do this as "members of the species Man whose
continued existence is in doubt". In this, scientists and statesmen will
need also to do another extremely difficult thing—namely, carry society with
them.

Are the world's statesmen and scientists prepared to do this? Do they
realise that they need to do it? Is society ready for it? Is it ready to
unlearn what a short- sighted generation of ideologues has for decades
taught it? I believe several among statesmen and scientists are so prepared.
Likewise, so are large sections of society. Action to reduce "BNC" arsenals
by major powers has, we must acknowledge, done well; no small achievement in
our cynical times. Climate change too is on serious government agendas the
world over. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's setting up a special team on
climate change and the initiatives being monitored by Dr R.K. Pachauri and
the dynamic new minister for environment, Jairam Ramesh, show that India is
serious about mitigating climate change. But the comprehensive change in
change, let us be honest, by bulk consumers of energy and fuel is not
proportionate-by-half to the need for it.

Scientists have to be technologists, just as artists have to be craftsmen,
and just as statesmen have to be politicians. But then scientists can be
philosophers as well, since they deal with the Substances of Life, just as
artists can be visionaries since they deal with the Essences of Being.I
described Martin Rees as a philosopher-astrophysicist. He shows the way.
More specifically, as men and women who have mastered the cognitive process
and the empirical method, scientists have it in them to be empirical
philosophers. And in that role they have it in them to make ours not the
final century, but an altogether new one.

The most abiding changes in history have come from changes brought about
from within the agents of change. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, is rightly regarded as the architect of modern India. But let us
recall what his distinguished biographer Sarvepalli Gopal has written about
him: "Nehru...who, at the end of 1956, surveying the large Bhakra-Nangal dam
had whispered to himself, 'These are the new temples of India where I
worship', confessed nearly two years later that he doubted very much if the
government would have initiated such a project if it came before them at
this time...."

It is time, I believe, for new 1955 manifestos covering all our perils
beyond the nuclear one. The time has come for the world of science to move
from the creation of destruction and the destruction of creation—which we
have all witnessed unrelentingly since 1945—to the fostering of our planet
in all its manifold diversity. The hour has come, but the minutes are
fleeting!

Former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam held up, quite rightly, the year 2020 as
a development milestone, a milestone for progress, for growth. But what if
the road to that golden milestone is strewn with landmines laid by Dr Terror
and Prof Error? The need now is for the alchemising touch of inner change,
the touch of redemption, within the impulses of our design for earth's
future.

This can only be brought about by the power of our 21st century's
observational mind. We need as a generation to move beyond outdated thought.
Forms of faster growth will be a fatal exercise. Not faster but different
forms of growth, new paradigms of progress, and fresh definitions of
development are what we need. The opposite of acceleration is not
deceleration, but the attaining of an optimal pace through what the Buddha
called Right Understanding. The faculty to distinguish between right and
wrong is ingrained in all of us. It is connected to a sense of
responsibility. Individual scientists who wield and use power know this
better than others. As Richard Preston (quoted by Lord Rees in *The Final
Century*) has said: "The main thing that stands between the human species
and the creation of a supervirus (that can be used in bio-warfare) is a
sense of responsibility among the individual scientists."

What is needed by Planet Earth is not a rollback, nor a "return to
simplicity". The opposite of complexity is not simplicity, but clarity. Ours
is the century of three negative 'globalisations'—global meltdown, global
terror and global warming. All three are boomerangs hurling back to hit the
very world that swung and set them in motion. When statesmen and scientists
work for the globe as a whole rather than for slices of it, they become
agents of the change that we need from within politics and within science.
If they do not, the world will have 'business as usual'. Until, of course,
the lights go out, literally and metaphorically. And the generators have no
diesel left in them and the alternatives shrivel up. But if they do, a new
dynamism can return to the earth.

We, in India, take just pride in our exciting space venture, Chandrayaana.
That huge undertaking is important for us. But in the scheme of life, while
there is such a thing as the important, there is also such a thing as the
urgent.When, from our mountains to our oceans, our terais to our beaches, we
see human interventions scooping the soul out of our heritage, when plastic
garbage grows like an indestructible fungus over every inch of public space,
when cement structures grow like pustules over public and private space,
when our Himalayan forests struggle, when our glaciers shrink, when our
rivers grow low or thick with silt and pollutants, our aquifers begin to dry
and die, and the air we breathe is laden with toxic gases, we need,
alongside Chandrayaana, with equal magnificence and equal success, a
Prithviyaana, which includes a Himayaana, a Vanayaana, a Jalayaana and a
Vaayuyaana as well.

More importantly, we need to modify the Mahayaana of mindless growth
propelled by bulk consumers of energy and fuel into a Hinayaana of
ecological intelligence and human responsibility.

------------------------------


*(The author is Governor of West Bengal. This essay has been adapted from a
speech he delivered in Calcutta on June 16 at the Variable Energy Cyclotron
Centre, Department of Atomic Energy.)*