Skip to main content

Too Hot to Live


"Rising heat in the 21st century is likely to push millions of people and entire regions out of their comfort zones," warned The National Geographic magazine a few months back. The earth is witnessing phenomenal rises in atmospheric temperatures. 

The summer of 2003 scorched the planet. France experienced a temperature of 40 degree Celsius for eight consecutive days. 15,000 people died in that country because of the heat wave. It was Europe's hottest summer in 500 years and it took a toll of 70,000 lives in that continent. 

The last six years have been the warmest ever recorded globally. It is not just about temperature. There are other disastrous consequences like hurricanes, drought, rising sea levels and sporadic wildfires. 

The heat affects the people's psyche too. Exhaustion due to heat can make people highly temperamental. It has been found that hotter weather leads to more violence and crime. It lowers children's creativity. Overall productivity shrinks tremendously. 

The International Labour Organisation estimates that high heat levels will cut working hours by 2.2% which translates as loss of 80 million full-time jobs. 

By 2050, American Southeast may become unfit for agriculture because of heat. India's prospects are no better. In fact, India will fare worse than many countries with its humongous population which is being driven into more and more poverty by the present government's policies. Millions of Indians will have no way of beating the beat. Only 8% of Indian households have air-conditioners. A greater percentage have no houses at all, let alone air-conditioners. 

ACs in Delhi: Pic from The National Geographic
All those who can afford it may fit air-conditioners to their houses. A visit to India's metropolitan cities will reveal a ghastly picture of air-conditioners jostling with one another on the walls of apartments. The International Energy Agency projects that the number of AC rooms will soar to 5.6 billion by mid-century from the present 1.6 billion. A few million of them will be in India too. 

The AC technology exacts a heavy price on the planet because it releases gases that raise the atmospheric temperature. In short, the ACs are part of a vicious cycle: we use them to cool ourselves and they in turn heat up our atmosphere more and more. 

Make necessary modifications to lifestyle or perish. That seems to be the only message we can learn from the situation. We should learn to accommodate a certain degree of discomfort for the sake of the planet and the future generations. For example, the car may not be needed every time you have to go somewhere. Some walking is good for health - yours as well as the planet's. A ceiling fan may be enough instead of an AC. [Air-conditioners are turning out to be one of the largest causes of global warming.] Fossil-fuels may have to be given up eventually. [Indian government is going out of its way to discourage the use of fossil-fuels by raising their prices every day invariably.]

There was a time when ascetics embraced discomfort and pain willingly as ways of soul-purification or self-discipline. It may become necessary for all of us to learn to accept certain discomforts for the sake of the planet. Or else, the planet won't be there as a suitable habitat for us. 

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter's CauseAChatter


Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Absolutely! I have been a life-long advocate for acclimatising; mainly because I moved to tropical countries from temperate ones and back again and had no cause to think that there was any need to artificially change my living climate. The ashram admin were suprised when this white woman refused the offer of an a/c room and chose instead a simple fan and open windows. Adaptation is the key to survival... building aircon is not adapting, it is over-riding and, as you rightly point out, adding to the very problem it is meant to solve. COP26 takes place in Glasgow from next week; let us see what the 'big guns' can agree upon and whether they will lead by example. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Without awareness of the problem as well as acceptance of certain hardships, nothing will work. It's good to see more and more people becoming aware and also taking necessary steps in this regard.

      Delete
  2. The point of saving the planet is far behind us now, cause even if someone stands up, the majority tends to take him down.

    I think the Earth lets us do this... slowly leading to the end of human race.

    Just think about it...
    The Earth seem to have no benefits from human life nor for the rest of the beings living in it, all we do is for our own good. We made ourselves on the top of the food chain for Christ's sake, so nothing's gonna affect the environment if all humans die all of a sudden. We have now become a threat to our own home and you have explained it really well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That point about the human species vanishing is something that I toyed with time and again. Is the earth actually trying to get rid of us, I wonder.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...