 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us D. Raghunandan of the People's Science Movement and who has also been involved with climate change, climate studies. Ragu, we have been seeing extreme weather events of the kind, high temperatures in summer, breaking various records in different parts of the world, and now really extreme high rainfall, the cyclone Harvey in Texas, Houston has seen supposedly 30 to 50 centimeters of rainfall. We also have seen very heavy rainfall in Bombay. People are saying within a few days it has been about something like 300 millimeters, which is again for two to three days in Bombay is quite exceptional. Is there any relation to such extreme weather events and climate change? Very much so. While one cannot with certainty say that a particular event is due to climate change, a series of such events and the fact that there are more extreme rainfall events taking place every year than earlier, that is certainly due to climate change. And this has been predicted in the IPCC's reports. It has been predicted by NASA. It has been predicted even by our own tropical metrology institutes. This is a well-known correlation with climate change. The prediction is that total precipitation or rainfall, whether it is more or less, is not the critical factor. But the feature that you are likely to see more and more, particularly in tropical countries, is that the number of days when you will get heavy rainfall, which means 200, 300 millimeters and more will increase. So, you may get the same total rainfall during the year, but that total rainfall will fall over a few days rather than be distributed over many days. It is an extreme weather events are going to increase. Exactly. So, which then will pose its own problems. It poses problems in agriculture because the crops are unable to withstand such heavy rainfall over short periods of time. It causes urban flooding of the kind we saw in Bombay because your drainage systems are not designed for such heavy rainfall falling within a short period of time. Even this time, your rainfall in Bombay on one day was about 290 millimeters or close to 300 millimeters. And these 300 millimeter rainfall days, we saw that in Uttarakhand in 2013. We saw it in Chennai in 2015. So, the number of such incidents has been increasing quite pronouncibly and that is due to climate change. The second feature about which there is today greater certainty than there was even two, three years ago has been the increasing incidence of tropical storms of the kind you have seen in Cyclone Harvey, for example. And this climate scientists nowadays say is not so much because of the warming of the atmosphere, but the rise in temperatures of the oceans which has caused changes in the ocean currents, the patterns of rising temperature in the oceans which then has influence over the monsoons, over large weather systems and over the formation of storms. So, the fact that Donald Trump thought this is a conspiracy by the Chinese and Indians. To somehow calm the Americans out of money. It does appear that the Americans will really pay through their nose if more such instances happen because Houston is facing billions of dollars of damage particularly, rail listed damage houses, roads, etc. etc. So, the US is not going to come unscathed if the world changes, the climate changes as it thinks. Not at all and in fact the US is going to suffer in a major way. If you compare the US to Europe, the Europe is mostly temperate and some of it is in fact arctic. So, they do not face the same kind of conditions that the United States does in which large parts of the US, particularly the cyclone prone southern coast, the Gulf of Mexico, Florida are bang in the tropical storm zone. And the US is definitely going to face more extreme weather events, large flooding events and Trump will be largely to blame because he is cutting down on funding for NASA in their weather forecasting and climate observation systems. He's cut funding for sciences as a whole including the National Academy and this is going to have extremely serious impact. Today the United States government websites don't have a section on climate change which has been taken down on Trump's orders and this is undoubtedly going to have negative impact and it's going to cost the US. So, even if it doesn't appear on the website, it's appearing now on front pages, leaving that aside, we also have the issue of what's called extremely high temperatures you've taken place all through the summers for the last 10-15 years. Every summer we have more or less consistently broken the record of the previous summer. Now, there is this attribution science which is now saying that in climate change models we have the ability to assign possibilities or probabilities much more clearly than we had before. And whether particularly temperature related issue, they said this predictability is much higher. So, do you see that as a clear indication that temperatures are consistently moving up now? Yes, very much so not only are average temperatures recording higher, heat waves are lasting longer and with higher temperatures than they were what you call the extreme temperatures. So, like we were talking about extreme rainfall events, you're getting extreme temperature events and you've seen in fact over the last dozen years or so, heat waves in Europe and that's a clear indicator of much higher temperatures in regions which are not used to high temperatures. You are now getting heat waves almost every year and you will remember that about a decade ago you had more than a few thousand depths in France due to heat wave conditions. Because also they're not used to this. And they're not used to it exactly due to which also you're getting higher vector presence of mosquitoes and so on in Europe because temperatures rise which creates more conducive conditions for vectors to survive and operate. So, what is the net result? Do you think it'll lead to some reversal of thinking in the United States particularly among the people? Because 70% of the people in the United States seem to believe there is no climate change, it's all a conspiracy. Do you think this could be the tipping point or we should hope so at least? Definitely think so and I think it will happen. There are also contraindications to the 70% who believe it's a hoax kind of thing. The contraindications are that while President Trump on the one hand withdrew from Paris, today you have 25 states in the United States which have pledged to meet the targets set in Paris. You have as many as 430 cities which have accepted Paris like targets and said they will meet those. California which if it were a country would be the 5th largest emitter in the world has accepted it will conform to Paris targets. This is a growing movement in the United States and I think one will see in years to come more cities, more counties, more states particularly in the southern storm-prone states will take steps of one kind or another to join the movement to fight climate change whether or not the White House supports them. So our sympathies to the people in Mumbai and to the people in Houston but hopefully saner councils will now prevail amongst the global population particularly those who believe that climate change is something they shouldn't bother about. I think the time has come to recognize it's an irreversible change we're introducing and the extreme events that we are seeing are really precursors which are warning us about this. Thank you for watching news click this all the time we have today do visit our website and also our facebook page and youtube chat.