Warming warnings
• West Orissa: Drought has become an annual affair and is spreading. Massive deforestation. Soil erosion silting up major rivers thus rising riverbeds and causing more floods downstream. Tempereature rising. Balangir district has reported an average rise of 8 degree celcius in the last 30 years
• North Orissa: Cyclone prone. With mangroves gone, cyclones have intensified. Recently gripped by drought. Flash floods due to rapid deforestation and rise in malaria.
• South Orissa: Prone to cyclones, droughts and floods. Land degradation leading to acute poverty. Forests depleting fast leading to agricultural and livelihood crisis like that of Kashipur
• East/Costal Orissa: Rising frequency of cyclones and floods.Depleting mangrove forests turning low intensity cyclones into more devastating ones. Wetlands have dried up. Heat waves reported
A SECTION of scientists and clima-tologists believe that Orissa's extreme weather conditions and their frequent occurrences are a dress rehearsal for the meteorological may-hem that climate change induced by global warming would cause on earth. Scientific and empirical evidences are being put together by the scientific com-munity to prove that the state might well be showing up the impact of cli-mate change. The people of Orissa who are getting used to the calamities also feel that climate has changed for the worse and its impact is being felt every-where (see box: Silent spring).
An analysis of the state's rainfall data and temperature variation reveals that summers are getting prolonged. "The state is definitely heating up,' says Murari Lal, chief scientist of department of atmospheric sciences, Indian Insti-tute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. Lal has concluded that Orissa's weather condi-tions are warnings of global warming. "Abnormal weather conditions are already a reality but nobody admits it,' he says.
Interestingly, for the first time the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) officials have acknowledged that there must be something seriously wrong with Orissa's climate. "Perhaps, the extreme weather condition is be-cause of climatic change or due to a general change in the behaviour of cli-mate,' says S R Kalsi, deputy director general, IMD (cyclone warning). This is a virtual U-turn for the IMD, which during the heat wave of 1998 , brushed aside the international surmise that the heat wave was an indication of climate change. The unprecedented heat wave in 1998 had been linked to the El Ni
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