Is it Global Warming, Or Chilling?

Some of us will remember a banner headline in major dailies a few months ago. One of them carried an eight-column banner on the possible Gangotri glacier meltdown and the threat to the entire Gangetic Plain. Pushing the panic button on such potential eco-disasters is not a bad idea--at least it will stir us into action!

Early August this year, newspapers quoted Nature Geoscience confirming what the scientific world has known for about 20 years: the Earth is a sensitive being and can very quickly, without notice, slip into another Ice Age.

So what is an Ice Age? When the entire globe goes into a deep freeze, when temperatures across the world drop below zero, all lands snow up, and sea waters become ice. The last Ice Age is marked to have been about 12,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries.

The last 10 years have seen some historic highs and lows on climate – the highest rainfall year in all times, the hottest day ever, the coldest day ever in Mumbai or Ahmedabad… Dubai saw snow last year!

These are symptomatic of a far deeper change and of disruption of climate the world over. New diseases never before seen are now being reported. The Rift Valley fever in Africa is an example of a revival of infections that had been eradicated.

While global warming is on everyone's lips, what is perhaps as possible is a sudden and abrupt cooling that can trigger the next Ice Age in less than 10 years. The last Ice Age, scientific evidence suggests, happened in as little just ten years!

There are factors beyond the Earth and beyond the harm we cause with the stress and pressure we put on her resources and her ability to bear abuse. The Earth saw, for example, about 250 years of a 'Little Ice Age' between 1600 and 1850 in all of Europe. Science today says that such a shift to an Ice Age could even been caused by a meteorite
that kicks up so much cosmic dust that it dims sunlight just enough to have the world slip into a cold spell that can last for many centuries.

This is no ballyhoo here. There has been folk knowledge across continents of the existence of such an Ice Age. Since about 1840, there have been recorded versions of such descended knowledge, which is more like cognitive memory.

It is a normal phenomenon for the earth on her enormous life cycles of ice ages, glacials [the colder periods within an Ice Age] and inter-glacials [the warmer periods within an Ice Age]. If you look at the earth's age of about 4 billion years plus, it is only the last 20
million years that the current ice sheet on Antarctica began to grow. Consider this against the age of the eastern ghats [about 700 million years] or the western ghats [about half that age] or the mighty Himalaya [about the same 20 million years]. Remember that the Earth is currently in a phase of what is called an 'inter-glacial'. The last glacial period ended, they say, about the time of the last Ice Age, 10 to 12 thousand years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are Greenland and the Antartic ice sheets, you will learn from any simple surfing of a few sites. Why are we seeing these big, complex changes in climate of the kind that is beyond our understanding? Because, say some experts, 'normally' an interglacial phase of relatively warm years for the Earth has lasted about 12,000 years. But then, as many experts, equally, contend that the previous such interglacial before the last Ice Age lasted as many as 28,000 years!

When will the next ice age come? Not for a long time from now, if we go by human time scales. For an ice age to start, the continents have to be in positions which block, or at least reduce the flow of warm water from the equator to the poles, and so have ice sheets forming at the poles. With a continent over the South Pole, and a near land-locked North Pole, science is clear that the Earth will continue to brave these ice ages quite well, thank you.

So take heart. Not all that you hear on these dire warnings are thanks to just what we have done the last hundred years! It is depressing, or humbling, to read these lines. We as humans are not even instruments in this unimaginably large sequence of change. We take what we get. And as our ancients did, we can only pay our obeisance to these forces, marvel at their might, or shake our heads in disbelief at these boggling goings-on!

There are no solutions one can offer. We cannot arrogate to ourselves such power, sure! Neither is it so immediate that you need to wake up tomorrow and change the way you live.

- Chandrashekar Hariharan
The writer is head of BCIL, a pioneer of green homes in India.