Pradeep Nair of Satara, Maharashtra, India, wrote a letter to Robert Hunziker, who had published an article on the suffering underway in India. Nair thanked him for his piece in Counterpunch on what he and others on the Indian sub-continent are experiencing. And he provided Hunziker with the remarkable, jaw-dropping personal experience his family has endured over the years.
The entire month (March-April) I was there it was hot as hell and so humid that I had boils all over my body. To add to that, untimely rains ruined our paddy crops. We usually cultivate rice in Kerala before the South Western Monsoons arrive in June.
This time the untimely rains washed away one attempt at cropping and the second time the seeds didn’t germinate at all. Elders in my family said that had never happened before.
About 25 years ago, we had moved to my home village in Kerala for a few years. A tributary of the Meenachil River (mentioned in Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning book ‘God of Small Things’) flows by our house and we used to bathe in its water. There were plenty of fish too then.
Now the water is so dirty, greenish and full of organic matter that we don’t even dip our feet in it for fear of skin irritation. Many fish species have vanished completely.
The global South is in danger when it comes to climate change. Historically, they have done the least to cause the climate emergency but are currently paying the lethal price for the west's indulgence in needless consumption.
In India and Pakistan, heat and drought have likely killed thousands upon thousands, mainly the poor and homeless who do not have air conditioning to survive temperatures of 122 F. Hot; humid nighttime temperatures can not provide relief so that the human body can cool itself.
Millions live in shacks constructed with tin roofs and tar paper for walls. I certainly could not survive those conditions. The official accounts of deaths are absurd one mentioned 90 deaths—a couple thousand by most reports.
People in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka suffer from sea level rise and cyclones. The same for Kenya, Madagascar, and Mozambique.
India, China, the stans, and Southeast Asia rely on the glaciers from the Himalayas to quench their thirst and feed themselves.
The most immediate and long-term threat is the unbearable heat that has become more frequent and deadly in the global South, the Middle East and, Noth Africa.
In India and Pakistan, blistering heatwaves engulfed the region in temperatures as high as 122 degrees since March. Due to rapid analysis of the heatwaves, scientists determined that climate change was to blame and made this heatwave 30 times more likely.
The team found that climate change increased the probability of the heatwave occurring to once in every 100 years; the odds of such an event would have been once every 3,000 years in pre-industrial times, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization in California that focuses on climate change and analysis of global temperatures. The researchers also show that the event was around 1 ºC warmer than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate.
“This study is really well done. It follows in the footsteps of a lot of excellent work that the WWA has done,” says Hausfather. “It shows an unambiguous role of climate change in making extreme heat events like this worse.”
In India, March’s temperatures were consistently 3–8 ºC above average, reaching highs of 44 ºC — the highest they’ve been since records began 122 years ago. Pakistan reported temperatures that exceeded 49 ºC in some regions. The heatwave was coupled with below-average rainfall in the region. Pakistan received 62% less rainfall than usual for March, and India 71% less. Although the lack of rain added to heating from the land’s surface, it also reduced the humidity of the heatwave — potentially decreasing health impacts, says Hausfather.
As global warming continues, intense heatwaves will become more common. If the planet stays on track to warm an extra 2 ºC above pre-industrial levels, the report estimates that similar heatwaves would become another 2–20 times more likely than in 2022 — and 0.5–1.5 ºC hotter. The authors add that the short period of observations limits the type of statistical analyses that is possible, and that their results are probably conservative.
Pakistanis and Indians have no air conditioning, the vast majority anyway. These nations' workforce work outside in farming and construction. Just imagine.
Wow!
The United Kingdom’s Meteorological (Met) Office has estimated that northwest India and Pakistan are 100 times more likely to experience extreme heat waves due to climate change. In an attribution study, the Met Office calculated these region’s chances of experiencing the kind of record-breaking temperatures seen in April and May of 2010, which was the highest combined average temperature for these months since 1900.
The attribution study produced a worrisome result that northwest India and Pakistan are most likely to experience extreme temperatures every 3.1 years, attributable to climate change. Considering the climate change projections, the study predicts that these regions have a high chance of extreme heat once every 1.15 years towards the end of this century.
Pakistan Today shares a story from Xinhua on the water crisis in their country.
In a conversation with Xinhua, Manzoor Wassan, advisor to the chief minister of Sindh on agriculture, said that the water scarcity is affecting almost all agriculture products in the province and the situation is feared to get worse in the coming days.
“Sindh is rich in production of cereals, mangoes, peppers, cotton, rice, wheat, and sugarcane among others, but due to water shortage the already standing products are in crisis whereas sowing of rice is facing delay,” he said.
The water shortage led by extreme weather conditions is also expected to result in a food shortage in Pakistan as the area of cultivation and annual yield is facing a decrease with every coming year, he added.
At a recent media briefing, Minister for Climate Change Sherry Rehman warned of a 50 percent decline in the production of mangoes in the country due to water shortage.
She said Pakistan ranks 5th in the world in producing mangoes, but this year severe water shortages and rising temperatures are expected to take a toll on the production of juicy fruit.
Water Shortage is also leading to many health issues including water-borne disease, heatstroke, and kidney issues among the residents of the country.
According to a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an estimated 70 percent of households in Pakistan drink bacterially contaminated water. The current heatwave has worsened the situation.
Climate change takes the back seat in times of geopolitical unrest. Today, the situation with Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the global food and energy crisis that it has sparked does not bode well for the continuation of life on earth. The days of delay are over and there will not be a do-over for us. Ever.
For the global South, it means continued suffering and the other brutality of the rest of us looking the other way and avoiding their pain and deaths.
When this news is not reported and unknown to most, it is a victory for the fossil fuel industry. Corporations' exploitation of the developing world while ignored by the media and others is able to reap the riches of the southern hemisphere's food, land, water, and fossil fuels. Nobody notices or cares.
The Amazon is sadly Exhibit A in this dysfunction. Bolsonaro has almost single-handedly killed off the 55 million-year-old rainforest. The world has turned away from that inconvenient fact as well. Disgusting.
