It is hard to be optimistic on the climate change issue. There are all the glaciers breaking down, all the icebergs that are melting. Coral reefs are in jeopardy and life at the bottom of the sea is slowly being extinguished by the disaster humankind has presided over in the course of millennia.
Of course, global leaders and climate activists have gathered in beautiful, soothing Sharm-el-Sheikh. Everyone will have a voice there, or try to have one. There will be suggestions; there will be a plenitude of anger; there will be incessant finger-pointing, at those considered responsible for the chaos we are all in today on this ageing planet.
Over the next few weeks those who have travelled to Egypt, in the noble mission to pull the world back from the brink, will pick their minds, despite all the recriminations bandied about, on the best ways of ensuring that the future does not slip away from us.
And yet it is difficult to believe that such gatherings of the great and the good, with a sprinkling of the mediocre, will be profitable for the world. Take a simple fact: the leaders of China and India and Australia and Canada are among those who are not there in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Joe Biden could not afford to leave Washington in the face of the Republican onslaught on his politics.
None of this inspires hope in us. Emmanuel Macron has made a forceful appeal for climate change to be reversed. Antonio Guterres is properly worried about our common destiny. And the indefatigable Al Gore goes on waging his battle to ensure that life on Earth survives.
All of this ought to be reason for all of us to suppose that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world. But take a look back at Glasgow, at last year's COP-26 bash. To what extent has the world benefited from the deliberations emerging from that summit?
Nations affected badly by climate change --- and our own Bangladesh is one --- have gone on complaining, with good reason, that the funds promised to them by the developed nations have simply not been there. The cheques have not been deposited in the banks. Fears grow in us of the threat climate change poses to Bangladesh's coastal regions.
There are, then, all the fears which throw up visions of the apocalyptic before us. Is this how life goes extinct and planets die? For decades, science has been delving into questions of life on planets away from Earth, on whether there is or there has been life anywhere in the galaxies we have been made aware of.
It is possible that the James Webb Space Telescope will stumble upon signs of life millions and billions of miles away from us. Given our limited knowledge of solar systems, though, outer space is strewn with dead and arid planets.
Our fears sprout from there --- that Earth could be headed in the direction these other planets quite likely have taken over time. Think again of Bangladesh. We now have, in terms of our heritage, four seasons --- hritus --- in place of the six that used to be.
Rains are largely an absent factor in these times, with monsoons having slipped into the region of the unpredictable. In what should have been a season of a soothing breeze singing through our trees there is yet the heat of summer we suffer painfully through.
At COP-27, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has put forth a forceful demand for billions of dollars for post-flood rehabilitation in his country. Climate change, as the recent floods in Balochistan, a mountainous region dotted with desert, have demonstrated is nature's monstrosity we are up against.
Millions of people in the region wallow in misery, with homes gone, cattle drowned, people dead. One needs to take no more than a glance at Balochistan to understand the life-threatening danger climate has turned into. We are all an endangered species.
So do we look to solutions to our worries coming out of Sharm-el-Sheikh? It is always healthy to think positive, to kindle hope of better days ahead. But it is nature, its fury, we confront. When in Somalia it is the images of fields losing vegetation and people driven by hunger making their way to relief centres miles away from home, we are petrified.
And we are afraid because we have known through history the nature of hunger, of famine, of millions of people perishing for want of food and nutrition. Famines in history have largely been a consequence of bad politics or human malevolence. But when it is nature which beats us into misery, when rain does not come, it is vegetation which dies out.
Those images out of north Africa --- famished cattle with their bones sticking out, their owners with bodies shrivelling up, skeletal babies in whom the eyes seem to be popping out --- haunt us. We do not sleep well at night, for our nights are waking hours peopled by images of creeping and expanding devastation across the world we inhabit.
Consider this: COP-27 is fittingly taking place in Egypt, in Africa to be exact. The continent contributes no more than 3 per cent of CO2 emissions and yet it is in the danger zone created by nations which through the decades have released CO2 into the atmosphere with impunity.
Which makes one wonder if this new phrase, loss and damage, taking centre stage in Sharm-e-Sheikh, will induce enough people --- and enough men and women who govern nations responsible for this existential crisis --- to work out the details of a proper 'save the planet' plan. Climate financing?
To what degree will the more prosperous of nations dip into their pockets to reassure frightened people, in the Maldives for instance, that their country will not go under water? How does one guarantee that Egypt and Sudan will not have the waters of the Nile piped away into Ethiopia by the Grand Renaissance Dam?
A bit of good news in recent days comes from Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's covid-denying leader who has brazenly subjected the Amazon to murder and brigandage, has lost the presidency to Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.
Is there a sliver of hope there? With sea levels rising, hills sliced away, crop fields getting buried under urbanisation, animal habitats commandeered by human greed, it is not easy to peer into the future. The present, loaded and dark, hangs over us.
