A fortnight ago, researchers P V Rajesh and B N Goswami published an open-access paper in Earth’s Future, showing that the footprint of the southeast monsoon, which used to stop short in the region of the Aravallis, leaving the Thar desert in the West parched, is slowly moving westwards.
This year, three districts of Rajasthan had to deal with a deluge for which they were not prepared. The phenomenon owes to the warming of the Indian Ocean. In the future, the desertification of northwest India, which has continued at least since Alexander’s incursion, will be reversed. At the same time, east India, which is heavily watered by the monsoon, will get less rain. This could be the most visible climate change phenomenon of the coming decades—barring the loss of the polar ice pack—and take northwest India back to the climate of the Indus Valley Civilisation, when the region appears to have had a jungle, going by animal remains and the depiction of animals in Bronze Age artefacts.
Future generations could log 2023 as the year in which climate change graduated from the abstract (save the whales, save the mangroves) to the uncomfortably concrete (heat exhaustion, save me!). The last 12 months have been marked by arbitrary weather worldwide, but that’s been normalised over the years. People’s cars have gone swimming in flash floods—right from China and Pakistan to the US—but that’s still the exception rather than the rule. Food inflation is biting hard as crops are damaged, and scalpers go into action, but that is not a novelty either. What’s new is that phenomena commonplace in the Global South have reached the North, which is reacting fast to the new reality.
Last summer, Miami-Dade County in the US-appointed the first ‘chief heat officer’ to raise public awareness about the effects of heat to the same level as awareness about severe storms. Bangladesh, which is very vulnerable to climate change because of its location at the mouth of the Ganga,
followed suit in May this year, appointing Bushra Afreen.
In both places, the prior stress had been on meteorological and hydrological phenomena related to extreme weather. The heat was just one element under an umbrella of possible disasters. With the appointment of heat officers, the problem has been singled out as especially significant. It needs delicate handling because the solution is part of the problem in affluent nations and cities: energy consumed and
heat liberated by air conditioning make things worse.
That’s in the realm of policy. In the personal domain, climate change has invaded our dreams—often nightmares. The Climate Dreams Project is a crowdsourced repository of people’s dreams triggered by changing weather. Sometimes, the accounts are like fantasy literature. In one, the dreamer rides whaleback among the skyscrapers of New York City. But actually, it’s scary because the dream’s plot assumes that NYC has sunk like Atlantis. And most of the imagery in other dreams is straight-up post-climate apocalypse dystopian, like scenes out of Mad Max: Fury Road.
After making fun of ‘indolent Asiatics’ for centuries, the West is doing serious research on the effect of heat stress on cognitive abilities and reasoning. An inverse correlation has been found between ambient temperature and oxygen saturation, which could affect cognition. People are up to 10% slower in the head when it’s hot, perhaps due to the heat itself and definitely due to dehydration, and students in overheated schools perform poorly in tests that require cognitive skills.
People who don’t get what’s happening tend to be irritable. Last year, JAMA Psychiatry reported more emergency room visits in the US due to mental health issues. Studies on traffic violation data in New Delhi and Perth, Australia, found that road rage incidents increase in summer. For decades, there has been speculation among criminologists, police forces and private detective agencies like Pinkerton’s about crime waves in the summer, which were first noticed in the UK.
In the Western economies, it’s put down to more people being out and about and fractious young adults being out of school unsupervised. But if violent crime were seen as a separate category, perhaps a summer uptick would be detected, too.
Whether one is looking at cognition or violent crime, much depends on social and economic factors because the homeless and the poor are more exposed to the weather. During the summer of 2022, the effect on food delivery gig workers, who spend long hours without protection from the elements, was disproportionately high.
Extreme heat has been a fact of life forever in the Global South. It’s getting a lot of scientific attention because now, the problem has reached the North not just for its psychological and social effects but also due to phenomena like the spread of the dangerous fungal pathogen Candida auris, a ‘hospital infection’ whose incidence has surged 1200% in five years of warming.
The heat was not a primary matter of interest in about 25 years of climate anxiety in the West. But it is now, spurring both thought and research that will benefit the South, too. The room cooler was a fantastic South Asian invention, but after rising humidity rendered it useless, making more energy-efficient air conditioners is about all the South has done to tackle the problem, and these devices are priced beyond the reach of the majority.
Technologies that dissipate heat or bounce it back into space would be far more helpful. Now that heat commands the interest of Western policymakers and scientists, perhaps such efficient inventions will
become available.
Pratik Kanjilal
Editor of The India Cable
(Tweets @pratik_k)