Climate change is an existential threat to our country and the whole world. This is an emergency There is an emergency and I will look at it as- Joe Biden, us President.
Due to fire and heatwave, only half of humanity has reached the verge of mass suicide. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations.
The kind of heatwaves seen across Europe will soon become the new normal. After that its intensity will increase. Carbon emissions are not decreasing and we have already filled so much carbon in the ecology that its negative effect will be for decades., peteri talas, Secretary General World Meteorological Organization, WMO.
These three statements have been made in the last one week. At the conference of environment ministers of the first 40 countries, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that half of humanity has reached the verge of suicide because of climate change. After this, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, Petri Tallas, said that the amount of heat that is happening now or the heatwave that is visible will continue to increase for many decades ahead. After that, on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden, standing in an old thermal power house in Massachusetts, said that the whole world is facing an existential crisis. They have said that they will take it as an emergency and take measures to deal with it in the same way. These are the three people who make such statements about the crisis facing humanity by climate change, who can make a concerted effort to change this situation. But sadly no concrete effort is being made other than talking about it.
US President Biden also just talked. He called it an emergency but did not declare a ‘climate emergency’. In the US, his own Democratic Party lawmakers and environmental activists are calling for a ‘climate emergency’ to be declared, but the President is not declaring it. The question is, what could be more emergency than this? At this time almost the whole of Europe is blazing and heatwave is going on from America to Japan and China. India has just emerged from the heatwave phase and even after the onset of the monsoon season, the heat is not over. Despite this, I do not know what is waiting to declare ‘Climate Emergency’? It seems that the world’s rich and leading countries are trying to escape their responsibility. They are shying away from incurring huge costs on climate change. That’s when Biden fulfilled his responsibility by declaring only $ 2.3 billion i.e. some 18 and a half thousand crore rupees, despite the emergency. It will also be used to build cooling stations and wind power projects around the Gulf of Mexico.
But to fix the condition of the world right now, many times more expenditure is needed than this. America and other world institutions will have to bear the responsibility. It is the responsibility of the developed countries to take concrete measures to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. If they want no more carbon to spread into the ecology, then they have to initiate measures to stop carbon emissions. India or other developing countries cannot bear the cost of this. India is full of alternative energy sources like solar energy, wind energy, hydroelectricity. But India or other countries like India cannot spend the amount of money needed to increase the production of alternative energy by shutting down thermal power houses. Keep in mind that India or other developing countries have very little hand in bringing the world to this situation. If the world has become so polluted or is burning today, then the reason for this is the developed countries. Even today, the share of developed countries in the carbon emissions in the world is 79 percent. They have to rectify this mistake of theirs.
Till now poor and less developed countries were facing the brunt of climate change. But now countries like Europe, America and Japan, China have realized this reality. Europe and seven developed countries of the world are currently battling scorching heat. For the first time in the history of Britain, the temperature has crossed 40 degrees. Apart from Britain, the heat continues to wreak havoc in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece. Due to the heatwave, forests are on fire in many places, due to which the temperature is increasing further. In a week, more than 17 hundred people have died in Spain and Portugal. In Britain, roads are melting due to heat and train services are closed for fear of melting and crumbling rail lines. Schools in the UK have been closed because of the heat.
In Spain, another European country, about 70 thousand hectares of forest have been destroyed and about 13 thousand people have had to leave their homes and go to safer places. In some parts of Spain, the temperature has reached 44 degrees. Heatwave is also wreaking havoc in Portugal. In Portugal alone, more than a thousand people have died between July 7 and 18 due to rising temperatures. The temperature in the French capital Paris rose to 40.5 degrees Celsius this week and 22 thousand hectares of forest area is on fire. It is getting hot in many cities of America. More than 80 million people, or 25 percent of the total population of the country, are in the grip of severe heat. Temperatures are expected to reach 40 to 50 degrees Celsius in US cities like Texas, Los Angeles, Oklahoma and Mississippi. For the first time in Japan, there was such a heat that there was a need to install AC in all the old age homes. Heatwave days in India were usually around 20, but this time their number has doubled.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization monitoring climate change, has said in its latest report that before industrialization, ie, compared to the 19th century, the temperature of the earth has increased by 1.25 percent at this time and in the next decade it will be one and a half percent more. Will go The result of this will be that the excess of weather will be seen everywhere. Somewhere there will be heavy rains and the incidents of floods and landslides will increase, then there will be terrible heat and somewhere there will be severe winter. Many situations can be seen simultaneously, such as it is raining heavily in China and it is also getting hot. If efforts are made to fix it seriously from today, then only in the next few decades the situation will be under control. But only if things keep happening, then every year the death toll due to excess of weather will increase.
