The blast furnace in mid-April. An extreme heat wave hit parts of India and Pakistan on Thursday April 28 with temperatures exceeding 46°C in several cities in these two countries, home to almost 20% of the world’s population. This extreme heatwave is expected to continue raging in north-west and central India for five more days and in the east by the end of the week, according to the Indian Meteorological Agency. Franceinfo takes stock of this new manifestation of global warming.
1What temperatures are recorded?
On April 29 in India it was up to 47.4°C in Banda in the north of the country and 46.2°C in the capital New Delhi Records from the Indian Meteorological Authority*. “It’s so hot it’s unbearable. Usually in March-April it is mild, it is spring, it is the months of May-June-July which are very hot. It’s really hard there, look how I’m sweating,” testified France 2 Deepak Kumar pulling his cart through the streets of New Delhi.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen such a heat in April,” Dara Singh, 65, who has run a small street shop in Delhi since 1978, told AFP. “The betel leaves I use to sell the paan [tabac à chiquer] spoil faster than usual. Normally this happens around May, in the height of summer.” As early as March, Delhi experienced a high of 40.1C, the hottest temperature since 1946 for that month.
Neighboring Pakistan is also affected by this extreme heat. In Dadu in the south of the country, the thermometer rose until Thursday, a record for the month of April. According to the Pakistan Meteorological Bureau*, it was 47°C in Jacobabad and 46°C in Khairpur in the same Sindh region. “Temperatures in some parts of the country are 5 to 7 degrees above seasonal normals,” they said same department*. According to the same source, March was the hottest month since 1961.
2Is it linked to global warming?
Heat waves are one of the most striking phenomena of climate change we know of, as the IPCC reminded us in its recent report. Since the 1950s, heat spikes have become more frequent and intense, driven by human-caused climate change.
“Climate change makes high temperatures more likely in India,” confirms Mariam Zachariah, a researcher at Imperial College London and author of an unpublished analysis of the current heatwave. “Before human activities increased global temperatures, heat like the one that hit India earlier this month would only have been observed about every fifty years. We can now expect such high temperatures about every four years.”
For her colleague Friederike Otto, co-author of the latest IPCC report, “until net emissions of greenhouse gases end, heatwaves in India and elsewhere will continue to get hotter and more dangerous,” those gases produced when we use fossil fuels (coal, oil… , gas) to move, heat or feed us.
3What are the consequences of heat waves?
At this heat spike, there’s no human toll yet. But these extreme heat waves are killing. In May/June 2015, a similar episode killed 3,500 people in India and 1,100 in Pakistan, recalls the encyclopedia Britannica*. Heatwaves in India have claimed more than 6,500 lives since 2010, according to AFP. In Kolkata, in eastern India, sugar water was distributed to passengers after a series of maladies on public transport.
In New Delhi, the heat is causing another public health problem. Landfill sites like Bhalswa’s spontaneously ignite and spread their toxic fumes toward homes. Three more fires broke out in less than a month at the capital’s largest landfill, Ghazipur, a gigantic mountain of rubbish 65 meters high. in pakistan, the weather office* warns of the danger of flash floods caused by a sudden glacial rupture.
To protect themselves from the heat, those who can afford it turn on their air conditioning. But the use of the latter causes electricity consumption to explode, leading to rationing and blackouts in northwestern Indian Rajasthan, western Gujarat and southern Andhra Pradesh. “The situation across India is dire,” Delhi Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal said, quoted by AFP. In Pakistan, several cities experienced power outages of up to eight hours a day in the past week, while rural areas lost power for half the day.
These consumption peaks plunge these countries into a vicious cycle: in India, 83% of electricity* is generated by burning coal (55%) and oil (28%). In Pakistan it is 86%* with gas (43%), oil (25%) and coal (18%). Fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases and further worsen global warming.
*All links marked with an asterisk are in English.