Climate Quests - What is this all about !

Where it all started...

Climate Change
When was the first time you heard this term ?

I think my earliest impression of climate change was that damned hole in our ozone layer. That graphic of blue shadow over the antarctic region was for me the introduction to climate change. Global warming, is what they said this hole will cause. The standard narrative was that the gases from our refrigerators and air conditioners eat up the ozone, allowing more UV rays to come into our atmosphere, which will melt the glaciers in our polar regions, increasing the sea levels and will ultimately drown the coastal cities at some point in future. I don’t exactly remember whether I read all of this in my science textbook or watched it in some TV show or read in some science magazine. But that’s about all I knew as a 12 year old kid.

“I’ll never go and settle in Mumbai”, I promised myself. “As long as I’m sitting here in this desert (Rajasthan), I don’t have anything to worry about ”, I used to think.

It isn’t all about melting glaciers…

I wish I could still stay that naive. A lot has changed since then, climate change isn’t just one ozone hole causing global warming and it definitely doesn’t exist only in our science books. Each passing year, it has become more real and increasingly local. And more importantly its here, it no longer appears to be something far out in the future.

A lot of insights have been produced and communicated in last few years on this subject. Thanks to countless researchers and scientists, we now have an enhanced understanding about what is climate change, what causes it, what are and will be its consequences and how can we solve this global problem. No corner of the world is unaffected by the consequences of global climate change. What started from melting glaciers, now connects to almost all aspects of human civilization in one way or the another. Our local decisions have an impact on global phenomena and in turn these global phenomena are impacting our local ecosystems. 

I thought I knew, but I was wrong…

I thought I understood climate change. The main cause is GHG emissions, consequences are melting glaciers & shifting weather patterns and solutions are to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and go into a circular economy. Pretty neat right! But I couldn’t have been more wrong. I knew it can’t possibly be this straightforward, but I also never anticipated how complex it can reveal itself to be.

It all started when I was trying to explain my mom why our weather patterns are shifting so dramatically. It is September and we are still running our desert cooler. I told her how humans are releasing so much of carbon dioxide into the environment, which traps the heat inside our atmosphere and she asked, why ? why carbon dioxide traps the heat ? What about oxygen, why it doesn’t trap the heat ? And guess what, I didn’t know why, I’ve always read that CO₂ is a green house gas and that’s what green house gases do, trap the heat, but why exactly ? 

So it turns out even I, a seemingly educated, IIT Delhi grad, doesn’t know a lot of things about climate change. Since childhood, I was passionate about working in waste management, considering it one of the parallel issues to climate change, but I never really took the time to understand how exactly the two things are connected and how important that connection is. A lot of people are trying to go zero waste, but is that an adequate response to this problem ? How big a threat plastic is actually and what are the real threats ? What are some of the action points, which are really effective on a larger scale ? 

 ..And that’s what it’s all about

That, is where my quest began, to understand this incredibly complex subject and explore all its far reaching tentacles deeply engrossed in our ecosystem. Past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot about various factors associated with climate change, like energy, transport, fossil fuel, waste, overpopulation, agriculture, extreme weather, regional impacts, mitigation, adaptation, carbon sequestering, climate justice, governments, industries, climate resilience etc. Reading about all this has been extremely informative and helped me develop a clearer perspective on the state of the things. 

“Impression without expression is just depression.”

– Rick Warren

Yep, the crisis is real and so is the anxiety. What I’ve been reading hasn’t been very pleasant and hopeful, its the exact opposite. And I thought writing about it and spreading awareness around this, is the least I can do as of now. So here, in this blog I’ll simply express my understanding of climate change, its causes, consequences, solutions and stories. Keep watching and stay curious.