Climatic Changes: The Attitude Problem

By Harsh Vardhan Bagaria:

“It’s getting hotter by the day… this global warming thing is really gotten out of hand… people say it will

get worse in the coming years…”

Almost all of us have been there, said the very same words, looked at the sun glaring at us during the day time while we wiped the sweat off our brows and wondered when the weather would become tolerable again. Almost all of us believe that nothing that we do will improve the situation.

Although India is growing at an average rate of 8.5% on its GDP every year, it is a developing nation. Its primary sector is still agriculture. Thus the changing climatic conditions are affecting the country in very adverse manners. Erratic rainfalls have caused wide fluctuations in the harvest; very often causing them to fail. With the lack of a well-developed transportation and storage mechanism, the prices of food crops are going off the roof. Food inflation alone was at a record high of 40%.

A slight change in temperatures results in the failure of crops like wheat which form the staple diet of the nation. The pressure on fresh water resources is rising as the day passes by and the flora and fauna of large parts of the country are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Such are the conditions in India itself. The superpowers of the world are well developed in terms of industry and add to the emission of obnoxious gases in to the atmosphere which primarily is the reason for these climatic changes.

We all realize about these issues but we have not yet been able to bring about an effective change. The youth of the country has made efforts like declaring and ensuring plastic free zones in educational and financial institutes and tree planting activities. But the most important factor is still quite often neglected. Household consumption of LPG and automobile exhausts are the primary factors responsible for global warming, which in turn has brought great deviations in rainfall patterns and temperature rise.

The government has been making attempts to control these climatic changes by working towards the usage of clean energy sources and setting various environmental policies, but we still are quite far away from our goals. Harvesting of rainwater and use of other renewable sources of energy are the major steps that have been taken over the past few years. In the midst of these crises, it is good to know that people have made conscious efforts to reduce pollution and protect their environment.

Turning off the car engines during traffic, reduced consumption of various electronic products that cause harmful exhausts like CFCs and events like Earth Day are major examples of youth awareness when it comes to these matters.

Hence it is important to know and realize that your individual effort may not be good enough to bring about the change we need, but it sure will be the start and will not go wasted. It is from these individual efforts that mass movements are born. Thus next time when you thinkhow much of a difference will it make, if I am the only one who pays attention? -Don’t!!! Because it does make a big difference. Our attitude towards our environment decides other people’s attitude towards it too.