After a late start, the rains are lashing Mumbai and its surroundings. The collateral damage is heartrending. The Rumale family, stuck in a halted local train near the suburb of Kalyan, decided to make a dash of it by walking down the track to the next station. It was a decision they will rue all their lives. Grandpa, who was carrying mother Yogita Rumale’s infant baby, lost control in the rain and the baby slipped off and disappeared into a swollen nullah below.
Not far away from the rail track tragedy, at Khalapur, Raigad district, a cloudburst of 400mm rain on Wednesday night brought the hill down on Irshalwadi, a small tribal hamlet, wiping out everyone who lived there.
Simultaneously and ironically, it is record-breaking heat that is killing thousands in the US, Europe and Asia. Wildfires in summer and off-season cloudbursts have become common from Canada to Australia; but for the first time extreme weather is making the news ahead of the Ukraine war.
About a third of US’ population is under heat wave alerts. Several cities, including Phoenix, and El Paso, Texas have broken records. In California’s Death Valley, temperatures have been hovering around a killer 54 deg C.
The waters off Florida in recent weeks are too hot to swim. Temperatures are threatening the coral reefs off the coast.
Europe is frying second year in a row with the Mediterranean seeming like an extended Sahara. Greece has shut the Acropolis to tourists during day hours fearing dehydration casualties. Spain’s meteorological service warned of temperatures of between 42 and 45 deg C. Japan has hit a 150-year all-time high.
According to one study, the heat wave last year claimed 61,000 lives in Europe, perhaps more than the number who have been killed in the Ukraine war so far. This year and the next promise to be even worse.
Can we make sense of all this?
Climate systems go berserk
Beyond doubt, climate change – only a debating point at UN conferences some years ago – has come home to bite the most skeptical. Extreme heat events have increased sixfold since the 1980s, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Increasing surface temperature from global warming has heated up the oceans in the Pacific; and this heat has been drifting inland – known as the El Nino effect – to cause wildfires and dust storms.
Heatwaves are also becoming longer and more intense in what were earlier cooler areas of the Northern Hemisphere, like Europe and the UK. This is happening because of the ‘heat dome’ phenomenon – where warm air moves up trapping and creating a high-pressure zone of hot air, and causing temperatures to soar over large areas.
One theory suggests higher temperatures in the Arctic - which has warmed more than four times faster than the global average - are causing strong winds called the jet stream to slow down thereby increasing the likelihood of heat domes.
Global warming, triggered by emission of green house gases, is also behind the increasing cyclonic storms and merciless flooding we have been seeing like in Pakistan last year. The melting of the Artic icecaps is pushing millions of tonnes of water into the oceans raising their level and threatening coastal communities.
Scientists call it the ‘dipole’ effect. In the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, the phenomenon occurs as warmer waters move westwards near the coast of Africa and the cooler waters drift to the East towards Australia. It has been occurring over the last decade due to ice melts and rising temperatures, which has been pushing more warm water towards the African coast.
Hotter days ahead
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN collective monitoring climate change, for the first time in 2021, underlined it was destructive human activity that had led to global warming and perhaps irretrievable climate change. The report sent shock waves around the world and has led to many formal and informal targets limiting the use of fossil fuels and cutting down on greenhouse emissions.
The object is to slow global warming to 1.5 deg C since preindustrial times if the Earth is to survive.
The report also predicted if the trends in climate change were not reversed, as many as 12 coastal Indian cities may not exist by the end of this century.
Reversing climate damage and moving to cleaner fuels is not moving fast enough. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has predicted “global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years, fueled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño event.”
The WMO also said in its May 2023 report that the annual mean global near-surface temperature for each year between 2023 and 2027 will be between 1.1°C and 1.8°C higher than the 1850-1900 average; and there is a 98% chance of at least one in the next five years beating the temperature record set in 2016, when there was an exceptionally strong El Niño. Clearly, things are likely to get hotter, before they begin to cool.