Najam in The News on Sunday on Climate Change
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed for a recent article on climate change and living in the Age of Adaptation.
Najam was interviewed for a June 23, 2019 article in The News on Sunday entitled “‘It Is So Much More Than Just Rising Temperature.’”
From the text of the article:
The News on Sunday: For a layman in Pakistan, what is rising temperature and how is it eventually affecting his daily life?
Adil Najam: The issue is NOT just rising temperatures. If it were just that it would be a much less difficult problem to beat. Rising temperatures, or heatwaves, is just one manifestation — one amongst many — of the great challenge of climate change. Climate change is a complex of multiple manifestations of changes in the greater climate system — not just changing weather. It is about temperatures rising in many places, sometimes in heatwaves, sometimes in erratic temperature swings, sometimes even in temperatures falling. It is about erratically changing rainfall systems; cyclones, tsunamis, monsoon bursts … or just the disappearance of expected rains. It is about drought. About floods, about snowstorms, about dust bowls, about rising sea levels, about melting glaciers, about disease vectors moving, about ecosystem endangerment, about invasive species, about species loss, and about so much more.
That, in fact, is the whole point about global climate change. It can change the entire GLOBAL climate system, and in ways that we cannot always predict. The fluctuations can be sudden, and massive, sometimes irreversible. If all of this sounds scary; it is because it IS scary. And the most scary part of it is that (a) once the system changes in one place it can make other parts of the system — sometimes continents away — also change, and that (b) our understanding of precisely what those changes might be when, when and how is still very very limited. Here is what all of this means for you and me, and for people everywhere: climatic patterns that have been fairly dependable and around which we have structured our entire lives — what you wear when, where to build our homes, when to take vacations, when to plant what and where, and so much more — is no longer dependable. Yes, that IS scary. And, yes, that is so much more than just rising temperatures!
TNS: Are we generally aware of climate change and what it means? Also, you have written that we are now living in the ‘Age of Adaptation’, what does that mean?
AN: Are we generally aware about climate change? Yes, we are. But only in very general terms. Unlike in the USA where a large part of the population (including President Trump) are climate deniers, most Pakistanis would not deny the phenomenon and most will affirm from their own experience that the climate IS changing.
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School and was a former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore Pakistan. Learn more about him here.