And Revathi did not come

Summer has descended upon the subcontinent .
The cities, towns, plains, and the once salubrious hill stations are heating up.
The days are hot, the nights are still. There is no escape.
It is immutable.Everyone waits for  rain. The Malnad is ready to receive her.

Even the beautiful Coffea Arabica  bud is ready. It awaits Revathi ,the pre-monsoon shower.  Revathi, the giver of life, the nurturer.In the wilderness of the Malnad will Revathi keep her date ? But this year she is late again. Her timely arrival is important. For some its life .For some its business as usual. Her arrival announces that the South West Monsoon is on its way.Her drizzle enhances the coffee bloom .The coffee farmer waits in anticipation.  She brings the Malnad back to life.

This year the temperatures in the Malnad touched 36 degrees  against a normal temperature  of 33-34 degrees Celsius. Apart from this higher than normal temperature, there has been a dry spell of  nearly 5 months in the coffee growing areas that is affecting coffee production. But Revathi did not come.

The  dry spell  and the high temperatures are worrying the farmers, specially in the areas that lack irrigation facilities. Coffee production in India is about 300 years old and largely occurs on small, family-owned farms - majority being up to 2.5 acres. The occurrence of irregular and unseasonal rain,  extreme weather events - have started to take its toll on India's coffee.The hard ,dark brown coffee bean belies the fact that the coffee crop is acutely sensitive and like most crops is sensitive to rain. A long-term increase in the number of extreme and unseasonal rainfall events has lowered crop yields, threatening the livelihood of those dependant on this sector .Coffee has seen a decline in its productions in the last couple of years. In fact the magnitude of this decline is quite astounding .Yields have declined almost 10% since 2000.

In the year 2009  both Arabica and Robusta suffered losses due to unseasonal heavy rains.Likewise, heavy rains during the blossoming delayed the harvest and lowered crop quality in 2010. There have been periods of drought  In 2002, Karnataka experienced a severe drought for three consecutive years (2001-02, 2002-03 and 2003-04). The IPCC on Climate Change predicts that yields from rain-dependant agriculture could be down by 50% by 2020 . In the Coorg region, some areas have already seen rainfall drop by one-third – from 106 inches per year to 70 inches.

The problem with today’s economy is that we have become obsessed by  the idea of "GDP growth” - which seems to be the single most important measure for success. A green economy is the only sustaining economy - it put values on natural resources, it uses resources sparingly, makes use of its natural capital rather than wasting it and stands committed to environmental protection.Our current GDP models do not recognise the role of natural capital.There is a lot that needs to change. Unless the economic importance of biodiversity and ecosystems, of ecology and forests, not just among economists, but at the level of policy makers, administrators, businesses and the public is understood,the wait for Revathi will get longer.

The Age of Innocence

Like the players in Edith Wharton‘s The Age of Innocence, climate change seems to be plagued with scandals.   There have been a series of climategates – from hacked emails of the University of East Anglia , to accusations of unnecessary alarm on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, exaggeration on the sea level rise that the Dutch objected to, lack of peer reviews within the IPCC, to CDM fraud and its unintended beneficiaries and even to Dr Pachauri s high carbon miles and his vested interests in clean tech businesses.   That he wrote a racy sex novella immediately before the scandal broke did not help the good doctor.

Ah. There was even Amazongate – which attacked the IPCC, claiming their data on the Amazon Rainfall was false. The claim was aired in hundreds of publications.   Only to be subsequently retracted by the Times. But the damage had been done.

Now wait till the full Al Gore sex scandal with his masseuse comes to he fore.  There will be a settlement of a few millions – it will get more eyeballs than 2010 year being another temperature record year, or USD2.65 billion needed to clean up the BP oil spill or the rapid Arctic Sea ice loss that we experienced in June or even drought in parts of the rainforests in the Amazon.  That we are likely to head towards a 4 degree temperature increase leading to near-total collapse of the huge Greenland ice sheet will get a dot of a mention.

Why even go to such sibylline locations of the Arctic or the Amazon.

In our own country we do not hear about environmental refugees from the Ghoramara islands of the Sunderbans due to sea level rise, who are forced to vacate their community.  Or the threat to our national security due to melting of glaciers along our borders with Tibet. That we already experience more severe droughts and floods is taken as business as usual. Food security will be under severe threat.

Neither is the rapid melting of the Gangotri glacier, a source of drinking water for 40% of the world’s population even newsworthy . That some of our revered rivers will become seasonal before they disappear completely has not caught the attention in any news reporting circles. 
 How desperate does the climate crisis have to get before we even acknowledge it.
Will we forget our Ganga as we did our Saraswati ?

Climate of Coincidence

As the world leaders were preparing to gather for the 2 week long climate change summit in Copenhagen on December 7th 2009 in an attempt to reach an agreement on climate change there was a sudden kerfuffle around hacked emails from a climate research institute. The now famous or rather infamous email hacking known as “climate gate” attempted to move focus away from the immediate need to solve the climate crisis. Whoever hacked into the email system timed the release well.
Timed the leak so perfectly so as to coincide with the opening of the Climate Summit.
The details that emerged from the hacked emails attempted to wipe out 21 years of climate science and research carried out under the IPCC .*
The IPCCs 4th Assessment Report of 2007 states:
• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
• Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations
• The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%
The body of evidence that human activity is a key agent in global warming is overwhelming. There is no question now that since the industrial revolution temperatures are rising faster than ever before in the history of mankind. It is true that temperatures and climate has changed in the past but never this fast. Changes in temperatures have occurred over thousands of years and not over a few decades. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere today stands at about 380 parts per million – never before in recorded human history have we had such high level of atmospheric CO2.
The first ones to react to this “breaking news” was Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh’s chief Climate Negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban told the BBC. “Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons”. He went on to say he expects it to derail the single biggest objective of the summit - to agree limitations on greenhouse gas emissions."It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,"
No relationship between industrialisation and increased temperature? I mean ,even school kids know that but Al Sabban does not – maybe he chooses otherwise.
As the world’s biggest oil producer, too much is at stake for the country if the world agrees to a global deal to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.
On December 7th – the opening of the summit, it was worth noting that of the 192 countries represented at Copenhagen, only Saudi Arabia raised the hacking incident. Saudi Arabia made a strong intervention in the opening plenary .They cast doubt on the science based on the hacked emails .Earlier this year in the pre COP 15 meeting in Bon, Saudi asked for hand outs, if it had to invest in adaptation to fight climate change! Saudi – too broke to invest in fighting climate change. And most recently asked for compensation if they were a loss of revenue due to a decline in demand for oil as the world struggled to move to clean energy.
To blame Saudi only for the resisting to acknowledge and fight climate change may be unfair - there are other oil producing countries and companies that align with Saudi .
But the sooner the Saudis and their ilk discover that when the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned and the last fish is dead, we can’t eat money, the better it will be for all of civilization.




* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific intergovernmental body tasked with evaluating the risk of climate change and was established in 1988 by UNEP and World Meteorological Organization under the UN . The IPCC is headed by Dr. Pachauri.