Two young girls cover their heads as they walk while drinking water in the scorching afternoon heat on April 25, 2022 in Mumbai, India. (Photo: Praful Gangurde/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
“The deadly heat this week in India and Pakistan should dominate the news everywhere,” said one environmentalist. “It’s a horrifying event in its own right—and a glimpse of what is likely to become routine.”
Kenny Stancil April 28, 2022
More than a billion people on the Indian subcontinent have been suffering for weeks amid a record-breaking heatwave, and with temperatures expected to approach 117ºF in the next few days, observers are warning that such deadly conditions are likely to become the norm in the absence of immediate and far-reaching climate action.
“Residents have described daily life as hellish, taps are starting to run dry, and soaring demand for electricity to power air conditioners has caused long and regular power cuts,” The Times reported Wednesday. “In northern India, forest fires are destroying agricultural land. Vulnerable people have been advised to stay indoors.”
Although heatwaves are common in India, especially in May and June, scorching temperatures arrived early this year, a clear manifestation of the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, according to Clare Nullis, an official at the World Meteorological Organization.
Last month was India’s hottest March in more than a century and one of its driest, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), and relief is nowhere in sight, with the region’s annual monsoon season still weeks away.
Extreme heat is expected to intensify over the weekend in India and neighboring Pakistan. Forecasters at the IMD said Thursday that temperatures in parts of central India surpassed 114ºF on Wednesday and are projected to approach 117ºF in the northwestern part of the country in the next two days with “no significant change thereafter.”
As the New York Times reported, “Heat-related watches were in effect on Thursday afternoon for all but a few of India’s 28 states, encompassing hundreds of millions of people and most of the country’s major cities. An alert—one notch up in severity—was in effect for the northwestern state of Rajasthan on Thursday, and would come into effect for other central and western states starting Saturday.”
“Pakistan’s Meteorological Department also warned that in regions dotted with glaciers, the heat could lead to so-called outburst floods, in which water spills from glacial lakes into populated areas,” the newspaper added. “In 2013, an outburst flood in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand led to flooding that destroyed villages and killed several thousand people.”
The Free 