India's PM: "Climate change won't stop progress"

[MKSheppard]

Um guys, Bangladesh is already screwed no matter what. The place is so low that it floods out on a regular basis, killing lots of people. I once heard it described as the worst place on earth with justification.

[Samuel]

Um guys, Bangladesh is already screwed no matter what. The place is so low that it floods out on a regular basis, killing lots of people. I once heard it described as the worst place on earth with justification.

We mean screwed as in the flood waters will come in and they won't go out again. As it is Haiti or some countries in Africa might count as worse. Bangladesh at least has the decency to be mostly stable and to have very fertile land.

Wont Bangladesh be one of the first places that people have to flee once the water starts rising? India's going to be hit hard by those people. Oh well, going to be interesting to grow old and see how this unfolds.

Someone on this forum joked that Indias solution would be to place the army between India and Bangladesh. I don't know how true that is.

However I do not think any of these countries are self-sufficient foodwise and rely on other countries for food. If that was to stop then british dishes such as haggis would be supplemented with new ones such as chav-soup and ned bread.

I believe India is now also having to import more food once again and are no longer self-sufficient as they where after the green revolution.

Prove it. Provide the data for India's agricultural output from the last couple years.

On another note India still hasn't maxed out its agricultural investments and can probably still increase yield per acre.

[His Divine Shadow]

Well I said believe, it seems they have only been intermittently troubled in bad years, other articles I have read have underscored that India has been loosing it's self sufficiency as time goes on, but I cannot find those, so this will have to do.
http://www.indiaonestop.com/Greenrevolution.htm

And while India can maximize it's agriculturual investments, it is far from certain that it is sustainable to do so. Already existing crop lands in India suffer issues with salinization (source: Jared Diamonds Collapse) and some of their water sources (rivers) are threatened at their source in tibet due to enviromental degradation there(Chinas grassland degradation in Tibet thus affects India). India is also facing issues with acquifer depletion (note two sources here). Where will the water come from if the major rivers see degradation in quality and quanity of water (source: Jared Diamonds Collapse) and the acquifers are emptied? The sources indicate current water usage is not sustainable and will lead to eventual depletion and crash. There is also possible future loss of land and disruption of the monsoon rainfalls to contend with due to global warming.

[Kane Starkiller]

Regarding CO2 emissions in 2007 China was responsible for 20.8% and US for 19.9% of total. Russia was a distant third with 5.5% and India fourth with 4.6%. So not only is US far more responsible but when you look at the total population it should be far easier for countries like US or even Russia to cut back then 1.2 billion India.
I mean when you have 33 million Canada emitting 43% of CO2 India emits it's no wonder India's leaders are telling the West to go fuck itself.

[Alyrium Denryle]

India has 800 people per km2 of arable land compared to: UK 1080/km2, Germany 700/km2, Netherlands 1800/km2, Japan 2900/km2, China 930/km2.
While it's population is massive they're not exactly falling over each other as most people imagine.

Um.. yeah, they are. They have a lot of unused space, but the cities are VERY densely populated. Mean values mean almost nothing, you need to be concerned with variance as wll.

[Kane Starkiller]

Are you saying the other countries I mentioned don't have cities or something?

[Ford Prefect]

Are you saying the other countries I mentioned don't have cities or something?

No, he's saying that mean values aren't spectacularly useful in this regard. Population density in Australia is about 3/km2, but the population density of cities is more like hundreds or thousands of people per square kilometre. New Dehli and Mumbai have much larger population densities compared to London, for example.

[Kane Starkiller]

The numbers I gave are amount of arable land per capita. It shows that India is not overcrowded any more than many first world countries when looking at a national level. Whether certain cities or neighborhoods are crowded is not really the issue.

[Guardsman Bass]

The main issue I see with the Indian position is that the climate change efforts aren't about negating the effects of the CO2 already in the atmosphere (at least not until they invent some type of super-effective scrubber), but stopping the addition of more. You might - might - be able to get the First World to agree to converge on some per capita and absolute emissions target, but they probably won't be able to do it if they see that at the same time, China - which is the world's largest CO2 emitter as of this year, IIRC - India, and other states are getting to pollute and use petrol to their heart's content.