The little knowledge that I have indiactes that with increasing population the emission of carbon dioxide increases. The CO2 emissions results in making cover around and stops the solar radiations to penetrate into the environment and reduces the atmospheric temperature. Reducing Atm Temp may cause the atm pressure to remain at moderate and high levels. This slows down the wind blows and hence results in reducing teh wind velocities. The Moonsoon pattern in sub-continent has usually been due to low pressures developed due to higher temperatures. The current pattern of lowering temperature in most parts of sub-continent would desrupt this pattern and the whole sub-continent is going to be affected by no or less Moonsoonic activities.

This is not over. The CO2 cover also reduces the diffusion and reflection of solar radiations back to the atmosphere. This means the solar / heat radiations would remain intact in the region. This would cause moderate climatic temperature. In other words, would make the temperature level of cold regions rise above the normal temperature range. This would cause melting of galciours, concentration of rains in northern part etc.

All above means the whole scenario of climate is going to alter. This would really go worsen and would cause huge loss.

Its time to rethink all the situation and push the policy makers to do something. Otehrwise we are going to ruine.

Then I went to India for the first time since college and coughed up black for a month. The weather was out of whack, and apparently had been out of whack and would be out of whack. It was the first time we spend our entire trip only in the cities, and the first time we spent so much time moving around in that Asian Brown Cloud, and it was awful. The trip was incredibly hard on my family, almost ruinous, and I came back with sinuses so raw that I couldn’t sleep lying down the first night home b/c my mouth would pool with blood. Our shocked lungs all fell prey to bronchitis, and there were consequences, and we’ll be dealing with them for years and years.

As soon as I got better I dragged the bike to a parking lot, and my dad (who was delighted he could finally get me to try again after 18-odd years) finally got me going. I managed to get the hang of it there, and slowly I worked my way up–parking lots to empty playgrounds to sidewalks to city streets. It’s been my first priority for free time and good weather for several months now. A lot of people make fun of me and trying to deal with the rules of the road can be excruciatingly embarassing, but I’m blessed with some incredibly good friends, many of whom cheer me via phone and email and chat, patiently answering my stupidest questions and fears, and one in particular, Scotto (one of my guest bloggers too) who has spent huge chunks of time shepherding me around town and teaching me how to be safe about it. I blogged about this more generally the other day. My favorite story about this is how he always acts like it’s no big deal–but of course he has his little backpack, b/c he’s Mr. Prepared. So one time we were riding along, me in front, and I–who was so incredibly terrified of falling for all these years–crashed right into a telephone pole, and fell right off. He zoomed up to me all concerned, but I was laughing too hard to even tell him that I was okay. Turned out that little backpack has bandages and antibiotic ointment in it. Also turned out I did’t need ‘em. I got up and we continued. Wow, that wasn’t so bad.

On Saturday a bunch of went to go see An Inconvenient Truth. On Sunday I made my first honest-to-goodness trip by myself. I had to walk the thing up a couple blocks of a hill, but man, flying down that hill was wonderful. I haven’t been a gym rat in a while, but I plan on joining a gym next week expressly to take advantage of bad-weather free time to keep training my muscles. My goal is to make it from the train station to my house, up a hill that makes car engines groan, and to my other regular destinations, so easily that I don’t even think of driving. God only knows how long it will take, especially since my life is sort of maximally stressed out right now, but it’s worth it. I just wish I had started sooner.

So while it’s true I’ll get all kinds of benefits and increasing tangential motivations out of this project, the overwhelming motivation was, and continues to be, a shocking awareness of how damaging we are.

I think the saddest blog I’ve ever read is this one by the son of NASA scientist Yoram Kaufmann. It was started when Dr. Kaufmann was injured by an automobile while biking to work, chronicles his progress and then his death. The family has decided to host a memorial showing of An Inconvenient Truth in celebration of their father’s lifetime of dedication to climate science. I used to read about bike accidents like that and subconsciously postpone yet again the day I’d try. Now this whole tragic story resonated, like a sitar-string, with a very different chord. How would Gandhi react to a story like this? When I read about this I thought, “I better go riding soon.”

I’m a total moron, a great sinner as we would say in Vaishnav parlance, when it comes to this stuff. But I’m trying to change. (My next goal is to follow MoorNam’s example and stick to my KleenKanteen and thermos mug.) And if I–wimpy, terrified-of-falling, procrastinating me–can even attempt to change my life even a little bit to stop this catastrophe, then I really think most of the people around here can probably do much better than me. Our community makes us proud and inspires us as individuals in so many ways. We were born with hearts already stretched around the globe. Of course we can be leaders in saving it.

Walk, ride a bike, or take mass transportation- buses, trains, subways. Airlines for long distance and overseas travel, as well as ships (though kind of scary, being out in the middle of the ocean and not seeing any land at all).

Along those lines, my grandmother used to say that, when she was a child, the rice from the paddy took more than a day to dry when left out in the sun. She died in 1991; by then the rice was typically dry by noon.

It’s June 12th as I write this. The monsoon rains which traditionally strike this part of the subcontinent – like clockwork – on May 31st/June 1st came early, lasted a few days, and haven’t been back to this part of the state in almost two weeks. I keep asking people, “Isn’t it supposed to be raining now?” and am told that typically June is “full rain”. This is often followed up by statements like, “everything is changing now…”. Global warming is high on the radar, but I have yet to hear this awareness accompanied by anything other than resignation.

All I’ve got are anecdotes – and I’m bracing myself for Razib to verbally eviscerate me for this highly un-quantitative post – but one need only spend a few days in any Indian city to understand why India qualifies among the top ten greenhouse gas emitters. Every time I come home and wash my hands, the water runs gray. Outside the Delhi CNG circuit, the buses continually decant plumes of diesel blackness. Burning garbage is still a common practice, except now that garbage is not just coconut shells and fish bones but a lot of plastic as well. When I really think about how much pollution I’m ingesting on a daily basis, I ponder getting the hell out of here ASAP. And then I remember – the country I’m returning to is the biggest culprit of them all…

Taz, I agree and am all for individuals dumping the styrofoam, but I also agree w/Cicatrix — for the reasons she said, but also because more active environmental policies and regulation often shape individual attitudes as much as vice versa, and in many cases can facilitate or stimulate the very individual/private efforts that you laud to overcome the collective action problems you rightly describe. In the absence of mandatory recycling, for example, many people wouldn’t even think about separating out glass, plastic, and mixed paper — for many of us, individual habits have been shaped by what government has done. Individual and private action very rarely takes place in a completely unregulated vacuum.

Also, I’m not saying that the tsunami was a result of climate change, but the natural disasters in those areas has made it clear that South and Southeast Asian countries cannot yet provide the kind of security for their peoples that comes with reliable technologies to predict natural disasters and credible political infrastructures to effectively facilitate emergency relief. Given that India and Thailand declined most offers of foreign aid for tsunami relief (India funding a huge portion of the aid to Sri Lanka by itself), the event of another natural disaster -climate based or otherwise- will put India in the same position. I’m not a fan of accepting foreign “aid”, but India will either have to invest heavily in domestic and regional public welfare services to prepare for the predicted climate changes OR accept that it cannot just refuse international aid at the expense of its people living and dying in misery from the lack of emergency relief- all just to try to prove that it is a major world power that is sufficiently providing for the victims.

We are definitely in dire need of institutional changes towards environmental sustainability, but I gotta agree with Taz on the power of individual behavior. Basic environmental politics will trace the history of the environmental movement along trends sparked by individuals, activist communities and social movements. Even if you spark no trends with your personal environmentalism, if you sat down and tried to calculate the amount of non-biodegradable or recyclable waste, your unnecessary consumption of scarce vital resources like water, and your emission of GHGs in a month/year/lifetime, you will be convinced that reducing your own ecological footptint can be a major relief for the environment. And if you still doubt the power of individuals reappropriating environmental ethics through example and social pressure, you should come to California’s central coast and try to toss a recyclable container in the regular trash. It’s the little things, you know…

Totally. I don’t think we’re in disagreement here…

Taz, I agree that there’s a lack of personal incentive to take as much care of common resources, but that doesn’t mean that some people and institutions are not more able and willing to take advantage of that situation, leaving them and the people who govern them with more power to remedy the situation than others. To me, this implies that in addition to consumer action, attempts to make people with power actually address this issue (whether building super or president) are an important part of the solution. The ethos of environmentalism that you’re talking about probably has to have a confrontational wing to it for it to make its way into the popular consciousness even more and force changes from businesses, government, etc. though it’s of course possible that things are already perceived to be so bad with the environment that even corporations and the business lobby might see it in their interests to reduce environmental damage.

Incidentally, here’s wikipedia on global climate change, including a handy pie chart for the sources of emissions.