A Threat Much Bigger Than Terrorism. Do We Care?

Paris. My most evocative memory is not the Eiffel Tower in the rain, but standing in a cold wind staring at Rodin's intricate and monumental group work sculpture of the "Gates of Hell" from Dante's Inferno.  Rather apt in this time and this age.

Right now, Paris is on most minds because of the terror attacks and the upcoming climate conference.

As far as I am concerned, we are circling the drain as a species. The attacks in Paris were heinous and shocking, as is violence anywhere in the world. War or terror, it is all appalling and abhorrent. I am not writing this to get into a debate on whether war is terror and if terror is defense.

I am mentioning violence here in the context of the climate conference. Does that seem weird? Let me see if I can explain it clearly. I also want to state here that by saying what I am about to, I am not disrespecting the people who died or the people who lost them, but I want to point out that violence is not limited to war and terror.

The 21st Conference of parties in Paris hopes to be able to come up with a consensus that will bind nations to agreed emission targets to keep global average temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees celsius. Since the industrial revolution, temperatures have gone up by 0.85 degrees. I am also not going to get into an argument over natural climate versus man-made climate change. I will, however, say that 97% of scientists agree that man-made climate change is a huge threat the future of the planet. Yes, natural events are just that - natural - but the speed and intensity with which they are occurring right now has never been recorded.

The climate is changing so fast that species are losing an ability to adapt. That's bad news. The last time that happened, the dinosaurs vanished and the world changed. Just over a 100,000 years ago, a mini ice age wiped out most humanids and we were maybe a few thousand people left alive on this planet. With 7 billion people and counting on the planet, that kind of change is, in a word, catastrophic or violent. We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction as we speak. Rising temperatures are set to wipe out a fourth of all species by 2050. The domino effect of that will be frightening.

Which brings me back to things like terror attacks. We are shocked, dismayed and horrified and rightly so. We should be. But let me run through some statistics for you here.

2 million people in Asia die every year from air pollution related illnesses. 600,000 die in India alone. It may not be a bullet, but it's death. A mother weeping over her dead child does not care if it was a terrorist, a bomb or air pollution. The death is a tragedy, and all death is violent. 20 governments commissioned an independent report in 2012 from the group DARA International to study the human and economic costs of climate change. It linked 400,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year, projecting deaths to increase to over 600,000 per year by 2030.

The five hottest years on record have all occurred post 1997. In India this year, 1,500 people lost their lives to a heat wave. In France in 2003, a heat wave killed 14,802 (mostly the elderly), according to the French National Institute of Health - an estimated 70,000 people were killed in Europe.

Global warming also devastates food security, nutrition, and water safety. Since mosquitoes and other pests thrive in hot, humid weather, scientists expect diseases like malaria and dengue fever to rise. Floods threaten to contaminate drinking water with bacteria and pollution.

When the report looked at the added health consequences from burning fossil fuels - aside from climate change - the number of deaths jumps from 400,000 to almost 5 million per year. Carbon-intensive economies see deaths linked to outdoor air pollution, indoor smoke from poor ventilation, occupational hazards, and skin cancer. As we do now every day in Delhi. When a third of our children have impaired and irreversible lung conditions and a third of them already suffer from malnutrition, climate change is terror.

I remember reporting during the tsunami at a relief station. Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered to get food and blankets. Many of them were just poor people who had not been affected by the tsunami, but who still had nothing and could not understand why they were not being helped. All their lives, they had suffered. Why, they wanted to know, were the people who lost things to the tsunami more special.

I guess my question is why do we see terrorism as such a massive threat, as indeed the only threat judging from the reactions around it? From trillions of dollars spent in war to screaming headlines. India needs 2.5 trillion to solve our climate change problems. We will however still put billions in defense, and a pittance in tackling climate change

More than 3 billion people have been affected in India and China alone between 1995 and 2015 by weather-related disasters according to a new UN report.

The fact of the matter is that it is singularly the greatest threat we face right now. When it really hits, everything we have thought of as threats so far, like terrorism, is going to look like child's play.

That cold day in the wind staring at the extensive, detailed horrific Rodin sculpture, I was struck by Dante's words: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great crisis maintain their neutrality."

This world belongs not to us, but to future generations. It is a moral crisis when we hand to them an impoverished planet. If we do nothing, well, then, hell it is. We will be living it .

(Swati Thiyagarajan is an Environment Editor with NDTV)

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