NEW DELHI/GENEVA: Extreme temperatures across India are having their worst impact in the country’s teeming megacities, experts said Thursday, warning that the heat is fast becoming a public health crisis. India is enduring a crushing heatwave with temperatures in several cities sizzling well over 45 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Temperature readings in the capital New Delhi rose into the high 40s Celsius on Wednesday, with power usage in the city—where the population is estimated at more than 30 million—surging to a record high. Indian media reports said Thursday that a laborer in the city had died of heatstroke.
"Cities are more vulnerable to the compounding effects of urbanization and climate change,” said Aarti Khosla, director at research institute Climate Trends. "Expect a greater number of hotter days, prolonged dry spells and less rainy days as weather patterns continue to change due to increased human emissions,” she told AFP.
Khosla described heatwaves as "the single largest threat to India’s well-being today”, adding that recent temperatures in Delhi and the surrounding region were "proof that the issue is now about survivability”. India is no stranger to searing summer temperatures but years of scientific research have found climate change is causing heatwaves to become longer, more frequent and more intense.
A study published by New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) this month said Indian cities were not cooling down at night as much as they had in the 2001-2010 decade. It found the maximum temperature decline was nearly 2 degrees Celsius smaller than previously.
"Hot nights are as dangerous as midday peak temperatures,” it said. "People get little chance to recover from daytime heat slaughter if temperatures remain high overnight, exerting prolonged stress on the body.” The highest confirmed temperature ever recorded in India was 51C (123.8F), in Phalodi on the edge of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert in 2016.
Researchers say human-induced climate change has driven the devastating heat impact in India and should be taken as a warning. "The suffering India is facing this week is worse because of climate change, caused by burning coal, oil and gas and deforestation,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the Imperial College London and director of World Weather Attribution.
"What we are seeing in India is exactly what scientists said would happen if we didn’t stop heating the planet,” she said. The world’s most populous nation is the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases but has committed to achieve a net zero emissions economy by 2070 -- two decades after most of the industrialized West. For now, it is overwhelmingly reliant on coal for power generation. The government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking a third term, says the fossil fuel remains central to meeting India’s rising energy needs.
Meanwhile, the swift announcement that a potentially record-breaking temperature measured this week in India could have been due to a sensor error highlights the challenges in certifying extreme heat. The recording of 52.9 degrees Celsius (127.2 Fahrenheit) in a Delhi suburb on Wednesday—surpassing the national record—was an outlier compared to other stations, and the India Meteorological Department said it was reviewing the data and sensors. The incident underscored the critical importance of verifying temperature readings, notably for monitoring and understanding how the climate is changing—and responding accordingly.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization is responsible for signing off on global, continental and hemispherical temperature records. The Geneva-based WMO maintains a global weather and climate extremes archive, which logs records for temperature, pressure, rainfall, hail, aridity, wind, lightning and weather-related mortality.
Its lengthy verification process involves months and even years of careful scientific checking, and sometimes sees measuring flaws and equipment errors bring down claimed records. The WMO first contacts the national weather service of the country concerned, and the organization that captured the supposed record in order to get the raw data. That includes details on the exact location of the reading, the equipment used, its calibration, and the regional weather conditions at the time. An initial assessment is carried out by the WMO Commission for Climatology and by Randall Cerveny, the organization’s rapporteur of weather and climate extremes, who heads up the records archive.
An international panel of atmospheric scientists then reviews the raw data and provides Cerveny, a geographical sciences professor at Arizona State University, with recommendations for his final verdict. — AFP