McKibben: 'No development will be of use if Ganga dries up'

Bill McKibben is a US-based expert on global warming and alternative energy. On a recent visit to India, he told Nandita Sengupta why India needs to bargain strongly on environmental issues:

How worrying is the state of the earth today?
Earth’s satellite images today are far different from five years ago. There’s much less white of the mountains, and much more blue of the sea. More white means 80 per cent sunrays would bounce back, but blue means that 80 per cent rays are absorbed. We never realised how quickly and how violently climate would change with a mere one-degree difference in temperature. The summer of 2007 was the best wake-up call when large parts of the Arctic melted. Dengue spread very fast, droughts increased. Most scary was the melting of high-altitude glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas. It turns out our planet is finely balanced.

How pertinent is India’s policy on the issue?
India has the least developed policy. Climate change is not a fully mature political issue here. People need to be clear about the danger to development posed by not doing anything. What’s the back-up plan if the Ganga’s glacier melts? No car factory will be of any use if the monsoons fail. No development will be of any use if the Ganges dries up. We can go on negotiating, but the real negotiation is between human beings on the one hand, and physics and chemistry on the other. Physics and chemistry have laid their cards on the table. 350 parts per million (ppm) is the highest safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Above 350 is the danger zone. The planet now has 390 ppm CO2, and this number is rising by about 2 ppm every year. Certainly, India occupies the higher moral ground but that won’t make the rains fall.

Times of India