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A street vendor crouched on the pavement and struggled for breath. A construction worker moved slowly, being careful not to pass out. A house painter was home sick and lost several days’ pay.
I met all of them one-on-one report trip to india in the summer of 2018. I went to report on the effects of a warming planet on what will soon become the world’s most populous country. I learned that extreme heat is destroying the health and livelihoods of the working poor in India. And if global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, then scientific models were telling us that the combination of heat and humidity could become literally unbearable.
Almost every year since then, India has witnessed extraordinary increases in temperatures. This year, however, the heat in large parts of the country does not subside, raising an urgent question: Is it possible to protect people for such an extremely hot future?
parts of northern and central India, Highest average temperatures for April.
For more than a month, temperatures in most of the country (and neighboring Pakistan) rose and remained there. The capital, Delhi, surpassed 46 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit) last week. West Bengal, in the sweltering east of my family’s home country, is one of those regions where the combination of heat and humidity can rise to a threshold where the human body is actually at risk of self-cooking. This theoretical limit is the “wet-bulb” temperature. a thermometer is wrapped in a wet cloth, accounting for both heat and humidity — 35 degrees Celsius.
In neighboring Pakistan, Meteorology Department warned last week He said daily high temperatures are between 5 and 8 degrees Celsius above normal and that rapidly melting snow and ice in the mountainous north could cause glacial lakes to burst.
How much of this extreme heat can be attributed to climate change? This is now aoutdated questionFriederike Otto, a leader in the science of linking extreme weather events to climate change, said in a paper published Monday. The rise in average global temperature intensified heatwaves “much faster than any other form of extreme weather,” the report said. Get used to extremes. To adapt. as much as possible.
I asked Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, what worries her the most. Failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause temperatures to rise, she said.
“We need urgent action. Probably at local levels, climate action and adaptation should go hand in hand with mitigation at the global and national levels,” he said.
Pune is not as hot as some other cities of India. Still, Koll’s son came home from school. with symptoms of heatstroke a few weeks ago. This prompted Koll to persuade the school to let the children go home earlier to avoid the hottest temperatures.
“This is just a school,” he said. There should be broader government policies to guide schools and workplaces across the country on what to do in the event of extreme temperatures. “We have enough data,” he said. “Forecasts show that these heatwaves will increase in frequency and intensity, so we need to act immediately to frame these policies. India needs a long-term vision.”
The good news is that the temperature forecast has improved. People pay attention to early warnings. Heat-related death rates have dropped, he said. But human suffering is not like that.
Last week my colleagues Hari Kumar and Mike Ives chronic cascading effects warm up. The wheat harvest was damaged. Demand for electricity increased, and with it, demand for coal. India halted passenger trains last week to evacuate rail lines for coal trains to coal-fired power plants. Politicians debated over who to blame for the insufficient supply.
Recently, a dumpster caught fire in the capital, sending toxic fumes into the misty sky.
Licypriya Kangujam, a 10-year-old Indian climate activist, told me on Tuesday that she doesn’t even want to go to school some days. The fans go outside as there are power cuts throughout the day. Then there’s the ride home on the airless bus. It is impossible to play outdoors. “It’s so hard. I’m always dehydrated, which causes dizziness,” she said.
His voice rose. This is after being forced to stay at home for two years due to the coronavirus pandemic. “We’re finally back at school. Now rising temperatures pose a new threat,” he said.
Over the weekend, a cartographer visualized the scale of human suffering. produced a map It is one of the most populated cities in the world and has colored them in shades of orange and red according to the air temperatures. India is marked with the largest, darkest red circles:
I asked Joshua Stevens, the map’s creator, chief mapper for NASA Earth, how many people were potentially exposed. He rounded up the numbers and messaged me on Twitter this morning: Nearly 99 million people live in India’s 10 hottest cities.
What India is currently witnessing turns out to be an increase of about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the start of the industrial age in average temperatures there. An analysis by Berkeley Earth.
That’s not what India is doing. Emissions in the atmosphere today comes largely from the United States and Europe – and increasingly from China over the past 40 years.
But which way the global emissions curve goes depends heavily on how India grows. Its economy is among the largest in the world and in a few years India’s population is predicted to be the largest. Their emissions will certainly increase – but how fast and how much they will grow depends on how quickly India can move away from burning coal.
According to the current trajectory, the average temperature in India is expected to increase by 3.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This will definitely cause more and worse heat spikes.
Global warming is truly a global problem. But India’s poorest and most vulnerable will certainly pay a very high price.
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Before you go: High fashion in the town dump
It’s confession time for Véronique Hyland, fashion feature director of Elle magazine. While she’s a fledgling, penniless fashion editor in New York, she writes that her favorite “shopping” secret is a small-town dumpster in Massachusetts that occasionally reveals treasures like a Gucci scarf, sky-blue clogs, and a Ferragamo bag from circa 1970. . Hyland was once embarrassed to talk about it, but today, at a time when luxury and fashion brands are forced to think of ways to save unsold or recycled products, she has decided that it is. time to clear.
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back on Friday.
Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill, and Jesse Pesta contributed to Climate Forward.
Contact us climateforward@nytimes.com. We read every message and reply to many!
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