The Climate Change - Issues and Challenges

By Dr. S. D. Naik

Summary

Dr. S. D. Naik’s booklet, issued by the Forum of Free Enterprise in the wake of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics (awarded to William D. Nordhaus and Paul M. Romer), surveys the climate-change problem as both a scientific reality and a development-policy challenge. The opening pages frame climate change as ‘no more an environmental concern’ but ‘the biggest development challenge for the planet’, with multi-sectoral and disproportionately poor-hurting effects. Naik then walks the reader through the basics — weather versus climate, the land-sea warming contrast, rising aerosol concentrations and consequent air pollution — drawing on a ‘Nature Climate Change’ study and on NOAA data showing 2018 as the hottest year on record and the 2014–2018 stretch as the warmest five-year span in 139 years of measurement.

A long middle section, headed ‘The Climate Crisis’, synthesises two landmark findings: the Hindukush Himalaya Assessment led by Philippus Wester (warning that two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers risk melting by 2100, with cascading consequences for the Ganga, Indus, Yellow and Mekong river systems and for 1.5 billion people downstream), and a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory study of an enormous warm-water cavity under Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier whose collapse could raise sea levels by roughly two feet. Naik uses these to argue that ever-increasing heat, rising oceans, melting ‘third pole’ ice, and intensified heatwaves and wildfires (Europe, western US) are no longer speculative scenarios but ongoing damage.

The policy chapters reconstruct the diplomatic record: the Paris Agreement of December 2015 (195 nations committing to keep warming below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C), Donald Trump’s withdrawal from it, and the Katowice Consensus of 2018 in Poland which produced a ‘rulebook’ but, in the author’s reading, ‘delivered precious little beyond’ it. Naik foregrounds India’s negotiating posture — 1.2 tonnes per-capita CO₂ emissions against a 4.2-tonne global average — while insisting that cumulative impact still requires India to scale solar and wind to 175 GW by 2022, reduce coal reliance, shift to electric mobility, and adopt green industrial processes. A brief detour invokes Ronald Coase’s argument that clearly defined property rights would neutralise externalities, but concedes that high transaction costs force governments to intervene against ‘bad’ externalities such as harmful emissions.

A closing section, ‘The Heat is on…Implications for India’, cites Sagnic Dey of IIT Delhi on health, food and water impacts, and a World Bank report (‘South Asia’s Hotspots’) warning that rising temperatures and erratic rainfall could cost India around 2.8 per cent of GDP and severely degrade living standards for 600 million Indians in vulnerable regions — already visible, Naik notes, in recurrent droughts across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Odisha and in Kerala’s 2018 floods, the worst since 1924.

Key points

• Frames climate change as the ‘biggest development challenge for the planet’, no longer merely environmental, with India ‘one of the most vulnerable countries’ given its agro-climatic diversity.

• Anchors the discussion in the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics to Nordhaus (climate-economy modelling) and Romer (endogenous-technology growth), arguing that India’s post-reforms growth came with lower energy per unit of GDP thanks to better technology.

• Surveys the Hindukush Himalaya Assessment (Philippus Wester): two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers at risk of melting by 2100, with downstream consequences for the Ganga, Indus, Yellow and Mekong and for 1.5 billion people across India, China and Pakistan.

• Uses NASA’s Thwaites Glacier study (an underwater cavity two-thirds the area of Manhattan) to illustrate that Antarctic ice loss could raise global sea levels by about two feet, threatening coastal cities.

• Reconstructs the Paris Agreement (2015), Donald Trump’s withdrawal, and the Katowice Consensus (2018) as the diplomatic backbone — judging Katowice to have produced a rulebook but ‘precious little beyond’ a global climate-action vision.

• Positions India in the global emissions debate: 1.2 t per-capita CO₂ vs 4.2 t global average, yet still among the top five emitters by absolute volume, requiring a paradigm shift in energy, mobility and industry.

• Invokes Ronald Coase on property rights and externalities, but accepts that high transaction costs and firms’ reluctance to internalise clean-up costs justify government intervention against ‘bad’ externalities such as harmful emissions.

• Closes with the World Bank’s ‘South Asia’s Hotspots’ warning that climate change could cost India around 2.8 per cent of GDP and harm the living standards of 600 million Indians, with droughts in Maharashtra/Karnataka/Rajasthan/Odisha and Kerala’s 2018 floods cited as early signals.

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