Hasn’t the Climate Always Changed?

Acharya Prashant

15min

69reads

CO2 in the air has gone from 280 to about 440 parts per million in just 150 years, a change that once took thousands of years. Yet we keep hearing that the climate has always changed. It has, but never this fast, never because of us, and never with 850 crore people living by the coasts and on the plains. The facts are a search away, so ignorance is no longer the reason. What is it within us that keeps denying the obvious?

This summary is AI-generated. Please read the full article for complete understanding.

[From a session on climate denialism, held beside a live demonstration: a block of ice standing for the Himalayan glaciers, slowly melting into a tank of water.]

Questioner: My question today is about climate denialism. Just for everybody, a climate denialist is someone who rejects that climate change is caused by human activities. Recently, I was looking at a lot of the arguments that they make in favour of climate denialism. So today, I would like to tell you about those arguments one by one. I have about 10 of them, and would love to get your thoughts on that.

Acharya Prashant: So you see now why they have put this here? (Audience laughs) Because this question was about to come, climate denialism. The ice can represent the ice sheets, the various Himalayan glaciers, the Arctic, the Antarctic, right? The thickness of the sheets there. The thickness and the spread both. And what will the water level represent? He has put a mark there. I can’t look at it, but it must be visible from that side. Some black mark, right? What does the water level indicate? The sea level. You see what is happening here?

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Participant: Glaciers are melting.

Acharya Prashant: Glaciers are melting, and the sea level is?

Participant: Rising.

Acharya Prashant: Rising. That’s what is happening here. And probably if this conversation extends for long, we’ll have a visible representation here itself. The sea level will rise right in front of our eyes. Depends on how eager you are with your questions.

Questioner: So the first argument that they make is that warming cycles are natural. Climate has always changed, and if we go back into the different interglacial periods, we see that climate has always fluctuated. So it’s nothing really new. In fact, if you look at temperature across 500 million years, we’re actually at slightly lower temperatures. So what’s the big fuss about?

Acharya Prashant: See, the answers are all there in the public domain. So when it comes to providing the data and the factual answer, I’m really not going to add some original value there, because these answers are all available. In fact, many times in the past, I’ve already discussed these things with you, including some objections to the very acceptance of the climate crisis as real.

You understand who a climate denialist is? Till a few years back, they used to say it’s not happening at all. Now they are saying it is happening, but then it has always happened. Or it is happening, but it’s not happening due to human activity. Or that it is happening due to human activity, but it’s not going to prove all that dangerous. So these are all the ones who call the whole climate discourse a hoax. In fact, if somebody like me, for example, talks of climate change, they’ll say he’s a climate alarmist. “He’s needlessly causing fear and alarm in the society when, you know, climate change, nothing like that is happening. Or even if it’s happening, no big deal.” So that’s climate denialism, right? Now, the first argument there is?

Participant: There is a natural cycle…

Acharya Prashant: Oh, it’s always been happening.

Participant: …it’s always been happening.

Acharya Prashant: The first argument is, it’s always been happening. Yes, it’s always been happening, but it’s not been anthropogenic. What is anthropogenic?

Participant: Caused by human activity.

Acharya Prashant: Caused by human activity. Secondly, it has never been this rapid. Thirdly, it has never happened at this scale of human population and human settlement. Sea level rises not just by a few millimetres or centimetres, but by a few metres. It won’t hurt us much if there are no coastal cities, right? But sea level rises by a few centimetres, and you have Shanghai and Mumbai and Calcutta and so many other coastal cities, then it hurts you, hurts you really badly.

Now, the most important thing: whenever climate has changed in the past, it is due to Prakriti, natural reasons, right? Orbital reasons or volcanic activity, such things. And the change has been greatly spread out in time. The changes have happened over thousands and lakhs of years. And what is happening this time? In the industrial age, in the last 100, 150 years, which is a very small period, the CO2 PPM has gone up from 280 to around 440 now. 150 years is nothing, because in the past, whenever temperature rose or fell, it didn’t happen in 100 or 200 years. It happened over lakhs of years. When it happens over that kind of time period, then the life forms have enough time to acclimatise.

And even in the current Holocene, it has been felt by human populations. Around 4,000, 5,000 years before Christ, which is like 6,000 years from today. When it happened, the human populations were smaller, so they could easily migrate. There is just so much land, and the entire population of the Earth was not even one crore. Not even one crore, mind you, when these things were happening. 5 to 10 million, that’s the estimate. So migration was easy, and even then, when migration was happening, it was not harmless. The Indus Valley civilisation itself is thought to have come to an end because of reasons related to climate change, shifting monsoonal patterns. The Sahara Desert of today was a lively green place, and then it stopped raining. The climate changed. And now you have nothing but sand there. Are you getting it? Then nobody got killed, because nobody was there to live. Today, think if the Indo-Gangetic Plain turns into a Sahara, what are the consequences?

So you cannot talk of what happened in the past and compare it with today. There is just no comparison. Over the last 150 years or so of recorded data, 10 of the 11 warmest years have been the last 10 years. CO2 concentration is rising by around 4 parts per million every year. That is the pace. When it happened in the past, it never happened with this rapidity. And it was not happening to so many people. These are the two things that you must consider. It was not rapid. It was like a million times less rapid than the pace that you have today. And also, because the population of the world itself was very small, it was not going to affect people in the same sense.

We are in it, so we are probably not quite present to the pace of the change. What is extraordinary is not just the rise, that 1.5 degrees of temperature rise is there. What is extraordinary is the pace of the rise, the speed of the rise. And it’s not just the speed, it’s actually an acceleration. When the Paris Agreement was signed, compared to that year, 2015, we are actually emitting 15% more CO2 this year. Whereas the agreement asked for a 44% reduction from 57 gigaton CO2 equivalent levels. Instead of reducing, we are actually increasing our emissions, and increasing our emissions at an increasing rate. So you have an increase in 2022. I’m not talking of the emission levels in ’22. I’m talking of the delta, the increase in ’22. The increase in ’23 is more than the increase in ’22. So not only are we falling, we are falling at an increasing rate. Are you getting this?

So this kind of a thing is coming only from wilful obfuscation.

You do not want to look at the facts in the face, because you want to save your skin.

Surely your conveniences or interests are at stake. So you come up with this kind of an absolutely lame argument.

(A chunk of the ice block breaks away and crashes into the water.)

This was an avalanche. This was the Nepal thing. You just saw and heard what happened? This is what happens when ice melts. I hope you have one camera dedicatedly focused on the ice itself. This was a lovely demonstration. So this is, for example, the Himalayan glacier. The ice melts, and you just saw what you had, right? And then they’ll say, “Oh, no, a landslide.” No, sir, no ordinary landslide, no ordinary avalanche. This is a part of the glacier itself that fell.

And here there are no human beings, in continuity with the answer that I’m giving. When this happened in the past, there was nobody living there. Now you have 850 crore people on the planet, human beings I’m talking of. Other species, well, we’ll come to them later. And imagine like 50 villages there, and this thing fell. What do you have now? Some 3,000 deaths. 3,000 gone like this. You have villages here now. Also, I suppose the level is rising here. So what do you have now? Floods. If this is the Himalayan glacier, this is the Himalayan river, or this is a Himalayan lake, a glacial lake, and this lake is now raising its levels, and very soon it will break its boundaries. And what will you have then? Sudden floods, flash floods. This is what is happening.

So please be very, very cautious of these climate denialists. They do not even deserve the benefit of the doubt. You cannot say, “Oh, probably they did not have enough information, so they are thinking climate change is a hoax.” Information is so easily and publicly available, and you are all educated people, and you are carrying information from the entire world in your palm today. The mobile phone is the biggest encyclopaedia. How come you do not know? Especially with the AI models that are available. Anything that you want to know is available in two seconds. Are you getting it?

The very pace is breathtaking. And breathtaking not just metaphorically, but literally. Breath taking. Think of any parameter, and you will see: temperature, sea level, CO2 PPM, the shrinking mass of the glaciers. You take anything, and you will see what is extraordinary is not just what has happened, but how swiftly it has happened. And the pace is only increasing.

(More ice breaks away.) Avalanches all over. (Audience laughs)

I’m coming from memory, so I won’t be able to recall everything this moment itself. There are multiple other indices related to climate change, and you pick up any of them, and you will find that it’s not just about what is happening, it’s about the speed at which it is happening. Forget about reversing the trend. The trend is only strengthening, and the trend is strengthening partially because we have intellectuals who come up with this kind of argument.

Coral reefs, for example. Rate of extinction, for example. The temperature difference between the lower atmosphere and the upper atmosphere, for example. The number of days with extraordinary weather phenomena per year, for example. The number of people dying of heatwaves, for example. The number of people displaced. All that is only increasing year after year. And you could have like 10, 20, 30 more metrics to substantiate the same thing. But I do not know whether those metrics would help, because they’re anyway in the public. As well-informed individuals, you would have already known those things, right?

What you do not know of is what sits within you, trying to deny the obvious facts.

That’s what you need to know. All else is data, and data is easily available.

Participant: I was just checking some things on the internet. One of the things that you said was the growth of CO2 PPM. The modern CO2 concentration growth, compared to the average growth in the Holocene period, is 1,040 times higher.

Acharya Prashant: Yes, that’s what needs to be highlighted, not just the growth, right? We talk of the Holocene; this period started when the last ice age ended. Because the ice age was ending, in this period that he just named, the Holocene, there was a temperature rise of 4 to 6 degrees. But this rise happened over thousands of years. And today you have had 1.5 degrees in 150 years. There is no comparison.

Also, that last rise was actually just 0.2 degrees above what we have had in the pre-industrial era. And when we say 1.5 today, that is 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial era. And those who talk of the 5 degrees increase in the Holocene period, they’re talking from the ice age levels. And this increase went only up to the pre-industrial level. And today what you have is 1.5 degrees above that. So there is no comparison.

We talk of the Harappa thing. Even the great Chola Empire, one of the reasons that’s quoted for their decline is climate. And they were the ones who ruled India for the longest period, right? Starting from the south. One of the reasons behind their decline is climate. Climate has always been big. It’s just that we were not all that big in numbers, so we escaped.

Today, what will you do with these 150 crore people in India? India has around 16, 17% of the world’s population, right? But when it comes to people who will be killed because of climate change, killed, displaced and the rest of it, it would be 40% Indians. More than one by three, that’s going to be the number. Minimum one by three. Minimum 33%, probably 40%. We are the ones who are going to be the worst affected, along with Nigeria, Indonesia and Pakistan.

Somebody comes and tells you, “Par ye toh hamesha hota hi raha hai” (But this has always been happening). This fellow is not just uninformed, he is malintended. “Hota raha hai, aise thodi hota raha hai” (It has been happening, but not like this). When it was happening in the past, did we have settled cities and farmlands? Can you move a city? Can you move farmland? Can you do that? And where will you go now? Where is the space to migrate to? Having one crore human beings on this planet is one thing; having 850 crore is another dimension altogether.

Questioner: I would like to add something from my data, from the IPCC. We were talking about astronomical growth: 0.1 degree Celsius per century for the Holocene period, compared to 0.27 degree Celsius per decade right now.

Acharya Prashant: So that is 27 times.

Questioner: 27 times. And not just the growth rate, the absolute rate has also been peaked right now. In the Holocene warm period, the maximum temperature observed was only 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

Acharya Prashant: Yes, that’s what I just quoted. And today you are already 1.5 above. Not just 1.5 above, very rapidly 1.5 above, and accelerating to 3 degrees, with all the feedback cycles just waiting to start at any point.

This 1.5 degrees was a result partly of political negotiation and partly of scientific warning. The reasons were both. Paris Agreement: why did we say we want to stop this at 1.5 degrees? One of the reasons is, when you are having negotiations, you have to settle at some mutually agreed number, so that was 1.5. The other part is scientific. At 1.5 degrees, irreversible feedback cycles get triggered. We do not know when exactly, but once they start, at 1.5, 1.6, 1.9, whenever they start, they cannot be stopped. They just cannot be stopped. And they become self-perpetuating. After that, even if you limit any additional CO2 emissions, the cycle would still carry on and roll forward on its own. That’s one of the reasons 1.5 degrees was decided, and we have already practically exceeded 1.5.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant

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