"In case of a dust storm, due to excessive heating, the water from the clouds evaporates before it could land. So soil is dry and the severe winds lift up this soil up to 500 metres above the land." Laxman Singh Rathore, Former Director General of the India Meteorological Department
Human caused climate change is happening at the wrong pace for those that attempt to bring the urgency of the issue to the forefront of discussion and action. The impacts from our fossil fuel dependence can be seen today, including changing rainfall patterns, increasingly hot heat waves ( that will make many places on earth uninhabitable), and more frequent and powerful storms. These natural disasters happening worldwide are a warning shot to all of us that if this continues, we will all suffer the consequences of our inaction. We know this because 97% of the most brilliant scientific minds agree that it is happening now, and will get catastrophically worse if we do not take urgent and immediate action to eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. Because the changes are way too slow for it to be seen as the urgent problem that it is, world leaders are able to provide empty gestures and rhetoric rather than taking the steps necessary to avoid the worst impacts from a warming world. They get away with it because many media outlets choose to ignore the phenomenon altogether.
The Hindustan Times reports on freakish dust storms, accompanied with heavy rainfall and hail, that struck North and Northwestern India over the past few days (including the capital of New Delhi a city of extreme disparity between rich and poor). Dust storms in this area of India are not uncommon during the dry season with “winds picking up desert sands from Iran and spraying them across Pakistan and India at high speeds”. The chain of thunderstorms were described by Mahesh Palawat a meteorologist at Skymet Weather as “a freak incident. Dust storms are usually not this intense, nor do these systems cover such a large area”. The dust particles from these storms are not coarse like sand, but father the fine powdery dust found in a vacuum cleaner.
A chain of powerful thunderstorms, a freak pre-monsoon phenomenon that experts blamed on a confluence of three weather factors, pounded parts of north and north-west India overnight Wednesday, killing at least 117 people and leaving a trail of destruction in at least six states.
The squall of storms had wind speeds of 80 mph as it barreled over the area, damaging homes, buildings, crops, uprooting trees and creating power outages.
A cyclonic circulation, induced by a western atmospheric disturbance, high moisture levels brought by easterly winds and a recent spell of unusually high temperatures that soared to 45 degrees Celsius were responsible for the thunderstorms, Kuldeep Srivastava, a senior official at the India Meteorological Department (IMD), said.
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Climate scientists attributed an increase in the frequency of storms to climate changes stemming from global warming, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
“Thunderstorms, flash floods and heat waves are likely to increase in future and their intensity will be more visible in northern India. This is also mentioned in the fifth assessment report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” said Venkatesh Dutta, an associate professor in the department of environmental science at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University (BBAU), Lucknow.
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