Climate Change Linked to Severe Heatwaves in India

May 15, 2024

New studies show that India’s heatwaves are getting worse, which is a very bad sign. Extreme weather happened in April 2023, especially in the east and south. It was said that climate change made these events 45 times more possible. This claim comes from a group called World Weather Attribution, which says that extreme weather is linked to climate change.

Understanding the Link with Climate Change

Because of climate change, heat waves happen more often and are worse when they do. The old ways of measuring heatwaves, which only looked at exact high temperatures, are now seen as not being good enough. Today’s standards take into account changes from the norm, so a place that normally has 28 degrees Celsius might have a heatwave at 35 degrees. This more complex understanding shows how climate change is changing normal weather trends.

Recent Evidence and Research

In previous years, similar studies found that climate change was to blame for the strange rise in temperatures in March and April. As scientists keep researching, attribution science has helped them figure out the statistical chances of these kinds of events happening in the climate we have now compared to a climate that hasn’t been changed by humans.

The Impact of Heatwaves

Heatwaves can be very bad for your health, making it easier to get dehydrated and making long-term health problems worse. They can even kill you. There are problems with uneven casualty numbers and not reporting enough deaths, but progress has been made in places where heat action plans have been put in place. Even so, the number of deaths reported by IMD and NDMA is not the same. This shows that we need better ways to collect and report statistics.

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies

Widespread Use: India has made heat action plans for 23 states because they know that heat waves increase the risks of health problems.
Preventative Steps: These plans include controlling the flow of water, changing work and school hours, and landscaping public areas to make them cooler.
Making cities more robust: The steps being taken to learn about and lessen the effects of heat waves are part of a larger movement toward more resilient city planning.
Strategies for Public Health: These steps also show how public health strategies are changing to reflect the difficulties brought on by climate change.

More About Climate Change

Because of climate change, clouds aren’t able to reflect sunshine as well as they used to. It is said that peatlands store twice as much carbon as all of the world’s woods put together. Up to 85% of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from phytoplankton in the ocean. When permafrost melts, it could let out very old viruses. If Greenland’s ice sheet melts, the sea level could rise by 7 meters around the world. Because of changes in the weather, the Sahara Desert has grown by 10% in the last 100 years. Because climate change can move large amounts of water around, it can slightly change the way the Earth spins. The Arctic is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world. Mostly, warmer sea temperatures are to blame for coral bleaching. The world’s GDP could drop by 23% by 2050 because of extreme weather.

« Previous Post Next Post »