Usually this is the time of year when the monsoon rains move north from the Indian Ocean bringing relief from sizzling summer temperatures with steamy downpours on the subcontinent. But this year's monsoon rains are late ...again.
Harsh Vardhan blames climate change for deadly heatwave, weak monsoon
Earth Sciences Minister Harsh Vardhan has blamed climate change for a heatwave that has killed 2,500 people and for deficient monsoon rains, after the government said on Tuesday the country was headed for its first drought in six years.
"Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon," Harsh Vardhan said. "It's not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change," he said.
The minister's comments affirm warnings from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that India will be hit by frequent freak weather patterns if the planet warms.
The arrival of the June-September monsoon rains, on which nearly half of the India's farmland depends, has already been delayed by about five days, and Vardhan said there was no certainty about when the rains would arrive.
‘It Is Climate Change': India’s Heat Wave Now The 5th Deadliest In World History
BY EMILY ATKIN
According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, India is getting hotter as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. With these increases in heat, the report — produced by 1,250 international experts and approved by every major government in the world — said with high confidence that the risk of heat-related mortality would rise due to climate change and population increases, along with greater risk of drought-related water and food shortages.
While he said it was too soon to directly attribute India’s current heat wave to climate change, University of Georgia atmospheric sciences program director Marshall Shepherd agreed that climate change is having an influence on many extreme heat events across the world.
“Attribution of events to climate change is still emerging as a science, but recent and numerous studies continue to speak to heat waves having strong links to warming climate,” Shepherd said in an email to ThinkProgress. He cited a 2013 report from the American Meteorological Society (of which is is the former President), which showed that in some cases, extreme heat events “have become as much as 10 times more likely due to the current cumulative effects of human-induced climate change.”
The fact that these deadly heat events like are more likely to happen because of climate change is more important than actually attributing the cause of one specific event to the phenomenon. That’s at least according to Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
“While we can argue over the specific contribution of climate change to any one heat wave much like we can argue over the contribution of steroids to any one of Barry Bond’s record season home runs, the fact that we are seeing unprecedented heat like this is attributable to human-caused climate change, just as India’s Earth Science minister has said today,” he told ThinkProgress via email.
Mann said that as climate change threatens to worsen as more carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, heat events once considered extreme would become relatively common. He noted that India’s nearly unprecedented deadly heat wave is occurring at current global warming levels of just 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit — so heat waves occurring under the “business as usual” global warming scenario that sees average temperatures rise 7 to 9 degrees by the end of the century would be much, much worse.
“[It] simply has no precedent in the history of human civilization,” he said.
From an article last week:
Poor bear brunt as India heatwave death toll tops 1,000
Southern India has borne the brunt of the hot, dry conditions and many of the victims are construction workers, elderly or homeless people unable to heed official advice to stay indoors.
Roads have melted in parts of the capital, New Delhi, where forecasters said they expected the high temperatures to continue into next week - adding to the misery of thousands living on the capital's streets with little shelter from the hot sun.
Hospitals in the worst-affected states were on alert to treat victims of heatstroke and authorities advised people to stay indoors and drink plenty of water as temperatures topped 45 degrees Celsius.
Hundreds of people - mainly from the poorest sections of society - die at the height of summer every year across the country, while tens of thousands suffer power cuts from an overburdened electricity grid.
Pallav Bagla, science editor of New Delhi Television, said the real death toll could actually be higher than that given by authorities, since "no one really records whether a person has died because of overheating or for some other reason".
Once again the poorest people in developing countries are the ones who are suffering and dying horrible deaths, as the developed countries take baby steps to reign in our carbon emissions.
We need to do much more to address Global Warming.