The earth is sick

An informative book on climate change. Unfortunately, it has some serious drawbacks.

CLIMATE change is the hot topic the world over today. It is threatening the lifestyle the West is used to, the lifestyle much of the Third World yearns for. The prognosis is rather disheartening. The earth is sick. It has fever, and the fever is about to affect its vital organs. And the infecting organism is homo sapiens, or human beings. We need to tighten up our extravagant lifestyles. They are not sustainable.

The most seriously affected parts are going to be the developing countries. So, we in the Third World are in a dilemma. If we push for development the way the First World did, we are going to aggravate the disease. If we do not, we are going to suffer anyway. In this context, Climate Change: An Indian Perspective by Prof. Sushil Kumar Dash is an important book.

A professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi, Sushil Kumar Dash has almost 40 years experience in research and teaching and about 70 scientific papers published in refereed journals. He has edited two books on the environment and climate change, but the present one is for the lay public and has been published by the Centre for Environment Education (CEE). The book starts with an introduction to the science of the atmosphere. The author describes how climate is classified, explains why there are different kinds of climate, introduces the reader to the major climate changes that have happened in the past and also explains how the Indian monsoon happens.

The next chapter introduces the reader to the concepts of atmospheric radiation budget and the greenhouse effect basic information needed to understand global warming and climate change. The third chapter looks at the evidence for climate change, including the melting of polar ice caps and Himalayan ice. The chapter also looks at the changes in climate observed in various places, such as the excessively cold winters seen in Europe, and also at phenomena such as the bleaching of coral reefs, the ozone hole and the so-called Asian Brown Cloud.

Changes observed in India are discussed in a separate chapter. At the outset itself the author observes: No attempt has been made here to establish whether the changes observed are due to man-made activities or due to natural climate changes. It is very difficult to arrive at such conclusions, unless consolidated modelling studies are undertaken in the future. This is a very important point that is often forgotten. The tendency is to attribute any incidence of heavy rainfall or severe drought to climate change. Whether that is indeed the case one is simply not in a position to tell right now. Sushil Kumar Dash presents data that show an increase in maximum temperatures in some parts of the country, some trends of a decrease in minimum temperature, besides rainfall data that do not show any particular trend and drought data that show a decreasing trend.

This is interesting because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts an increase in the area affected by drought. Unfortunately, he does not give us the source of the data. Another interesting bit of data shows that the number of monsoonal depressions and cyclones in the north Indian Ocean has been decreasing during the past four decades. One would expect them to increase.

Chapter five deals with the possible impact of climate change on India. It discusses the impact on agriculture, forests, the coastal zone, mangroves and mountain ecosystems. Since these are forecasts based on the predicted changes in temperature and other parameters, they are bound to be largely empirical and hypothetical. However, they give an indication of what we should probably expect.

The rest of the book deals with matters such as technology (clean development mechanisms, alternative sources of energy, and so on), Government of Indias initiatives (such as environmental protection policies, national science programmes, and so on), special issues of concern (such as forest management, coastal zone management, and biodiversity) and the uncertainties involved in climate-change studies. The book has three appendices on acronyms, chemical compounds and units.

A book such as this is required reading for anyone interested in the future of the country. Unfortunately, though the book contains a lot of information, it has serious drawbacks as well. One of the most important problems is the identity crisis the book seems to face whether it is a popular science book or a technical one.

On the one hand, the author explains simple facts such as how sunlight falls at different angles at different latitudes (something that even a high school student should know). On the other, some of the sentences would be difficult even for a postgraduate in physics to understand. For instance, the author writes: The aerosol optical depth is the column-integrated aerosol extinction coefficient at a given wavelength.

Another major drawback is that it lacks a good index and a glossary, something that any good book, especially on a scientific subject, demands. These simple things that add considerably to the usability of a book seem to be ignored often by Indian authors.