Panaji, Jan 4 (TNN): The first day of Goa's New Year brought unseasonal rain showers. Such weather surprises are increasingly routine in every part of the world as we enter an age of climate change brought on by unprecedented global warming due to increased carbon dioxide, methane and other gases in the atmosphere.

Things are heating up, fast. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has assessed last year as the hottest ever, since record-keeping started in 1880. "The provisional information for 2014 means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century," said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud, "There is no standstill in global warming."

Jarraud warned, "What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives. What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the northern hemisphere. Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and associated atmospheric concentrations are committing the planet to a much more uncertain and inhospitable future."

Climate change's impact is already playing out with devastating consequences. Acclaimed novelist and writer (and part-time Goa resident) Amitav Ghosh persuasively argues the civil war in Syria "has, to a significant degree, been shaped by climate change" that was "triggered by the catastrophic drought that began in 2008."

He says "the world should be very, very worried. The future to me looks very, very bleak... I think we are literally staring catastrophe in the face and we are sleepwalking towards disaster. In California they are literally using their last drops of water. Are people aware of it? No, they are watering their lawns and carrying on as though there is endless water ahead. They have lived beyond their means, as the whole world has, for years, and the bill is coming due."

Ghosh points to the reckless, criminal irresponsibility of the world's richest (and most responsible for carbon emissions) nations. "If you take two examples, the US and Australia, both have made it perfectly clear that they will make no move on climate change. At all costs they want to preserve their own standard of living if even it be at the expense of destroying the whole world. It is nationalism carried to its greatest and most absurd extreme. Essentially what we are seeing is an absolute refusal to address any of the issues, to reach any kind of compromise geared toward the world community and absolute insistence on maintaining their own standards of living which are unbelievably wasteful and which have really essentially created the problem in the first place."

By American standards, Indians are not big contributors to "greenhouse" gases: just 1.9 tonnes of carbon per person per year contrasted to 7.2 tonnes in the USA. But those emissions have gone up 300% in the past 20 years, and will overtake the European Union's levels in the next five years. The country meanwhile faces some of the highest risks due to climate change—the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change outlines catastrophe in India caused by extreme weather patterns: severe threat to food security, widespread disease outbreaks and chronic water shortages.

None of these frightening predictions should cause panic, Goa was reminded by that same UN panel's chairperson, and Nobel Prize winner, Rajendra Pachauri when he delivered the first Mathany Saldanha memorial lecture in Panaji last year.

He said the smallest state in India "is very vulnerable" to climate change, especially the marked rise in ocean levels. He predicted "we could get sea level rise up to 98cm, a very serious outcome for a state like Goa".

But he also saw an opportunity for Goa "to develop as a model for sustainable development not only as an example to India but to the whole world." He referred to Japan—which has handled high population density and rising ocean levels comparatively deftly—and the Netherlands, which has managed to stave off the sea with ceaseless innovation, dykes and careful land reclamation. Most significantly, he cautioned state authorities to stop messing with coastal regulation zone notifications, a recipe for manifold disasters that he warned come much sooner than expected.

Was anyone listening to Pachauri? In 2015 we'll undoubtedly start to see just how well Goa is set up to survive the age of climate change.

The writer is a widely published author and photographer.