NATIONAL 5 (Spotlight Weekly)]

Cloudy Questions

Discussions on climate change and natural calamities acquire a new urgency amid the continuing downpour

BY AKSHAY SHARMA

The storm clouds on the horizon bring two stories. The first is good news, especially for farmers that depend on the rains. The bad news is the increase in natural calamities during the season.

"There were clouds so low that they seemed to touch the river Salli," said 14-year-old Ram Kumar of Palubari, south-east of the capital. "My friends and I want to fly kites, but the rain is a setback," he says.

The current downpour is an unusual phenomenon. The monsoon has come earlier and lasted longer than expected this year, say experts. The country has been suffering from diverse effects of the environment, as there has been little rainfall in western and eastern Nepal.

"The roads are all right," says Bhagwan Poudel, chairman of a village development committee in Bara district, south-east of Kathmandu. "I was surprised by the rainfall in Kathmandu valley during my two-week stay here."

"Nature welcomes us with so many things but it’s been harsh on the farmers in our area. Most of the people in my village are busy planting maize and wheat. This is one of the most important seasons for us. All the income expected from the crops we plant depends on nature itself."

Is this climate shift an effect of global warming? One degree Fahrenheit — one tiny mark on the thermometer. It doesn't sound like much, but it has served as the spark for an explosive debate. Scientists agree that the planet has seen an overall warming trend of about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the last century. Is the debate over? Hardly.

Scientists disagree on the phenomenon. Some say global warming is a natural process. Others say it could be beneficial. And still others say if humans don't do something to curtail their influence on the climate, the consequences could be serious. What makes global warming such a hot topic is that, in some ways, the evidence contradicts itself. Warming temperatures are most obvious in the world, and that trend is more pronounced during winter.

However, in recent decades, a cooling trend has been observed in the fall across much of the central and eastern United States. Tree rings, sediment samples, and ice cores, have been used to study the earth's ancient climate record. These proxy records have revealed that history has seen more severe temperature swings than modern times.

Researchers have found that, over the course of the millennia, overall temperatures have swung as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more in one decade. However, when comparing current records to proxy records, the data suggests that several years in the 1990s were the warmest in much more than a century.

But the records paint an unfinished picture. Modern-day information is, in many ways, substandard. The oceans, for example, are a largely unobserved abyss of information, as there are very few measurements able to be taken from its vast area. One way scientists compensate for this void is to use satellites.

Scientists also use computer models to help them predict the future of the planet. However, the inconsistencies are overwhelming. The computer models are in a state of infancy so the scientific debate is not surprising. Scientists do agree that that the planet is going to be warmer. They disagree by how much.

If scientists can't even agree among themselves, what are we to think? This means many different components to the global warming debate have to be considered. To what extent are humans responsible for the current warming? How much warming has there been and will take place from this point forward? What are the specific impacts past, present, and future of climate change?

The patterns of rainfall have changed, agree experts. Today, scientists are measuring global climate change in the atmosphere and at the surface, as well as analyzing the composition of greenhouse gases, which may be contributing to this change. These measurements help researchers determine what factors are influencing global warming, and provide them with an indication of how fast that warming is occurring.

While experts debate these issues through models, tests and scientific inquiries, Nepalese farmers have to work in the muddy fields and plant crops. "This season demands hard labor from us. Some of my sons probably will get sick working in this downpour," says farmer Rajan Subedi.

The newspapers, meanwhile, are full of stories of landslides and the resulting loss of life in different parts of the country, renewing the debate on the threats from deforestation and on ways of making rescue-and-relief work more effective.

Teenagers like Ram Kumar have their own concerns. "Dasain is approaching and we are still getting rain. How are we going to fly kites?"