For over a month, India has been experiencing record-shattering high temperatures. Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India, joins to discuss how these temperatures are tied to climate change, and how residents are coping.
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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC Good morning again, everyone. Now our climate story of the week and we turn this time to India and Pakistan, where people have been suffering through unrelenting heatwaves since last month. On Monday, Delhi, the Indian Capital reached 120 degrees, rare even for there. PBS reports that only one-tenth of Indian households have access to air conditioning.
Many lower-income families rely on fans, but the increase in electricity use has caused the demand to soar and it's causing rolling blackouts. The high temperatures have also set off fires in landfills and caused school closures. The temperature is taking a toll on agriculture too. Here's a clip of a farmer from Delhi speaking to the PBS NewsHour on May 10th.
Brian: [Indian language]
Interpreter: If it wasn't for the extreme heat and March, we would have had 20% more harvest. The grains are smaller this year. If temperatures were cooler, they would have looked bigger.
Brian: In Pakistan, Federal Minister for Climate Change Sherry Rehman, told reporters recently that for the first time in decades, Pakistan went from winter to summer without a spring home to some of the most glaciers in the world, some of the biggest glaciers in the world, I should say, Pakistan is now experiencing extreme flooding in some regions where they are melting. A new study published on Wednesday by the United Kingdom's National Weather Service reports that the heat waves in India and Pakistan were made over 100 times more likely because of climate change caused by humans.
Joining me now to explain more about how these temperatures are tied to climate change and how this impacts India's nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants and Pakistan's almost 227 million is Roxy Matthew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India and a lead author of the International Panel on Climate Change, their sixth assessment report which came out recently. Dr. Koll, thank you for joining us. Hello from New York and welcome to WNYC.
Roxy Mathew Koll: Hello, Brian, thanks a lot for bringing me into this discussion and for highlighting the heat waves that we are going through. Thanks a lot.
Brian: Listeners with ties to India or Pakistan, you can help us report this story. What are you hearing from your friends and family members back there? Anyone listening right now? Maybe recently get back from a visit to India or Pakistan and how did you cope with the high temperatures? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 and you can talk about how you and your connections there are talking about climate change as a factor here, if at all, when did they even start using that term?
Or you with your family members and calls back home, 212-433-9692? Are there politics of climate skepticism in India or Pakistan like here? 212-433-WNYC, for anybody who wants to help us report this story. Meanwhile, Dr. Koll, listeners who may be familiar with India and Pakistan, know that parts of these countries do routinely experience high temperatures. What makes these current heatwaves anomalous?
Dr. Koll: Yes, hot summers are kind of normal for Northwest India and adjoining Pakistan region, but what made this particular heatwave stranger? Something like coming out of fiction and that is because the heatwave has resulted in cascading and compound effect on the food, water, and energy sector that has potential to derail all the mitigation and adaptation strategies that we are currently working on. What heightened the risk of this heatwave was the absence of rains during March to mid-May, but before getting into the rains and all, let me tell the number 51 degrees Celsius, that is 124 Fahrenheit. That was the last conversion I'm doing in terms of Fahrenheit because I don't deal with Fahrenheit, but the research is.
Brian: Yes, I have my tribe here, I know that's right.
Dr. Koll: Perfect. This was monitored, this 51 degrees Celsius was recorded in Pakistan, but even India, parts of Delhi you mentioned that it hit about 49 degrees Celsius and the important thing here I would like to--
Brian: Right, which is 120 Fahrenheit.
Dr. Koll: Yes, exactly.
Brian: As I understand it, there's also the humidity, which is measured by something called a wet-bulb temperature. 120 in Delhi is not 120 in Las Vegas, for example, which is very dry.
Dr. Koll: Yes, and global warming can support more moisture as the air gets warmer, it can hold more moisture. There's more moisture available as the oceans are warming and evaporating, more moisture available. It increases that wet-bulb temperature. The impact, the heat stress on humans are much more and the important thing about this, the critical thing about this heatwave was it started early, and it was long-lasting.
It's like two or a season-long heatwave. It's not a heatwave for one day, or one week or a month, a season-long heatwave with temperatures the anomalies of 5 to 7 or 8 degrees Celsius and it doesn't cool at night, even the nighttime temperatures are so high, that there is no option for cooling down even at night. That's what we are looking at and it was aggravated by this compounded effect of a rainfall deficit. If you look at the rainfall that these regions were supposed to receive, the Northwest India and adjoining Pakistan, we see a rainfall deficit of 70% to 90%, which was not expected, and a combination of a heatwave and dried or drought conditions can be deadly leading to impacts such as widespread fires, crop loss, and water scarcity.
High temperatures and less water results in more air conditioners for cooling and groundwater pumping for irrigation, leading to more electricity demand and more emissions. You see the demand for cooling leads to more heating up the planet as well and there's one more impact the particular dry and stagnant and most of the conditions also lead to raise pollution levels during this time. Basically, the impact of heatwave is on the food, the water, and energy sector and we are seeing that, in fact, the clip that you run, the farmers are seeing the reduction in the grain sizes and we are looking at grain shortage. In terms of exports, India is one of the largest exporters of wheat and we are seeing a reduction in that as well.
Brian: For people who have never been to India or have only been to certain major cities, they may not know that the North has a whole different mountainous topography with glaciers, I kind of tripped myself up in the intro saying most glaciers or biggest glaciers, but it's really about the number of glaciers, it's a lot of glaciers, and this is also true in Northern Pakistan, I understand which has more glaciers than almost anywhere in the world. For people who aren't familiar, I wonder if you can describe that area of Northern India and Pakistan a little more and what's happening now during these heat waves because in addition to the fires that you were just describing from the drought aspect of this, there are also flooding because of the glaciers melting, right?
Dr. Koll: Right, the northernmost parts of India and Pakistan are-- until now we used to say they were blessed with the Hindu Kush Himalayan ranges and the glaciers that hold a lot of water which gradually bring the water for sustenance for the people, the huge population that lives in the foothills of this Himalayan ranges. Now what is happening? One, the climate change assessment from the subcontinent shows that the total amount of snowfall that this region with glaciers is receiving has declined in the last several decades while the amount of rainfall has increased. The snowfall over these glacier-covered mountains have reduced, so glaciers are also retreating or melting, but at the same time, the rainfall has increased.
This results in two conditions. One, flash floods because there are more rains than ever and the ice and snow is melting faster and this results in some of the glacial lakes bursting out occasionally, like we saw a few years back in India and similar floods have occurred in Pakistan as well. Also, as these glaciers melt, the gradual release of water to downstream communities also reduce leading to drought conditions. We are looking at two situations arising at the same time because the glaciers are changing, the climatic conditions are changing, so both floods and droughts in the recent period, but on a long term period if the glaciers are retreating, that could lead to severe water scarcity issues in the streets.
Brian: Rita in Paramus, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rita.
Dr. Koll: Hi Rita.
Rita: Hi, thanks for taking my call and for this very important issue. My parents live in south India and they have been surviving in this heat and they're elderly so they're not able to move around during the daytime and are restricted to evening when the weather is cooler. My worry for India as a whole is that there is such limited awareness of climate change as a concept. It's almost like it's an issue for the more privileged because majority of India is suffering from exorbitant inflation and other problems in the country and they're just worried about survival. Climate change is not even on most peoples' minds and I don't know that that's going to change in the next several years. Not a question just to comment on the issue.
Brian: Rita, thank you very much. Professor, you get the idea?
Dr. Koll: Yes, right. There are two points, so like what Brian was telling. Are there more skeptics or is it something else? In terms of skepticism, I would say there are fewer skeptics, but climate change is not the priority. That's what I would say based on the listener's comments.
Brian: Yes. That's what the caller is saying because what seemed like immediate needs rather than climate change which takes a long-term view to get your head around takes precedence.
Dr. Koll: That's what I'm also pushing to. We need to make it an electoral agenda. It's not one of the key agenda items when elections come like in the US. We need that at the district level, at the state level, and at a national level, but that's not happening. That's not the priority here.
Brian: I think some people are still asking the question, how much of this extreme heat can be blamed on climate change because not every heat wave means long-term climate change is happening. Not every fire, not every flood, not every drought, so as a climate scientist, what's your answer to that question?
Dr. Koll: We have sufficient data to show that the frequency, the intensity, the duration, and also the also area covered by this heatwave have increased and they are projected to increase further as well. Now, if you look at the local mechanism, the way the atmosphere interacts and results in stagnant, drier, season over the India, Pakistan region, that's how the heatwave develops over that region, but how is it trapping more heat?
That excess heat, additional heat is coming from global warming and we see temperatures of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius spanning anomalies, spanning over more than three months, and we see that can happen only due to global warming. More and more studies are coming for attribution attributing to each and every single event. We see the trends, we see that it's aligned well with the global warming trends, but if you want to look at each event and attribute it to that climate change and global warming, that could be a distraction stopping us from climate action and from climate solutions.
Brian: Yes. Joan in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi Joan.
Joan: Hi. I was wondering what is the overall effect on the ocean if enough glaciers, which I assume is freshwater, when that melt into the seawater, how does that affect the salinity of the oceans and how does that affect the fish and other things about the ocean, the fact that you now have a lot of freshwater mixing with the saltwater?
Brian: That's a science question. Go ahead, professor.
Dr. Koll: Yes. I love that question because my focus is on the oceans. In fact, oceans play a key role in what we are seeing, whether in the Indian subcontinent and South Asia or even in the US. That's because oceans are absorbing more than 93% of the additional heat from global warming. What we are seeing in terms of heatwaves and all is from that remaining 7% absorbed by the atmosphere, land, and the glaciers, and the sea ice. If we come to your question, the impact of glacier melting in terms of sanity is much lesser than the impact of the heat absorbed by the oceans themselves are.
In terms of sea-level rise, we see that, particularly in parts of Indian Ocean and West Pacific and all, the sea level rise is not just because of glacial melting, but also because of ocean warming, rapid ocean warming, and more than 50% of the sea level rise is attributed to ocean warming, why? Because as the deep ocean warms, the ocean is more than 4 kilometers deep, in miles, it's difficult for me to convert into miles, maybe 2.5 miles. This depth of the ocean is warming and as the water warms, it expands, so the sea level rise that many of us experience, especially in the South Asian region or the larger Indo-Pacific region, is largely due to this warming and not only due to precious melting.
In some regions, especially in the Northern Bengal region due to glacier melt and all, it is changing the salinity and the way it is mixing with the saline water below. This is changing how the waters mix with the nutrients for the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants in the ocean, and is changing the way how the food change, the food pyramid is working in the oceans. Well, we don't have much research on how it is directly impacting the fisheries and all, but there is preliminary insight that this is in fact changing the food chain.
Brian: We're almost out of time for this week's climate story of the week on the Brian Lehrer Show today about the extreme and unprecedented heatwave in India, 120 degrees in Delhi on Monday this week, for example, and the fires and the floods and the high humidity in some places and the drought in other places and the fires, oh my goodness, with Roxy Matthew Koll, a Climate Scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India, and elite author of the IPCC, the International Planet Panel on Climate Change from the UN, their sixth assessment report, 212-433-WNYC.
We could get in a last caller or two perhaps, but I want to make sure to ask you before you go about the personal story that you told Somini Sengupta, the international climate reporter for the New York times recently, about how a few weeks ago your child came home from school with heatstroke symptoms, and as a climate scientist, you knew somewhat what to expect or what that was and you got the school to change some of its rules that they've never had to change before, right?
Dr. Koll: Right. We live in a city called Pune where the temperatures are generally mild, but this time the heat encroached-- the area covered by these heatwaves is expanding, so it reached Pune as well, we saw temperatures about 40 degrees Celsius and this was also the time after COVID, the schools had just started, so we were all excited. As parents of two kids, we wanted to push the kids to school, but what happened was that when the kids are coming back from school, they're coming at the time when the temperatures are at their peak at 2:00 PM, 3:00 PM, when the temperatures are at their peak and their school vans do not have air conditioning and it's open.
We see that they are facing all this heat and sun with hot air pumping into their body and by the time my son reaches back, his name is [unintelligible 00:19:46] he told me to tell his name to the listeners. When my son comes back from school, we see that he's unable to move at all, he's straight away runs to our bedroom with the air conditioning and he sleeps there for three or four hours and this is something we have never seen. He usually goes off to play with his friends after school and seeing him in a heat-struck situation, the very next day we approached the school we also showed them the forecast.
We said that the media is covering more of this kind of news in the recent decades so we showed them the forecast and they were ready to change just the school hours half an hour or one hour early. They were ready to leave the kids so that is what happened, but this is just for one school, we need this to happen as a policy across India. We know we have sufficient data to show which are the regions where the heatwaves are increasing and we need to have policies in all those places.
Brian: Last question then, is a political question. India has, what? 1.4 billion people, the United States doesn't even have the 0.4, but we produce so much of the greenhouse emissions that wind up affecting a place like India, which doesn't produce so much. How much of global warming is India itself responsible for and if it's little what does India need from highly industrialized countries like the United States?
Dr. Koll: Before getting to India I would like to talk about global emissions and responsibility as well. This is because local weather extremes like that we see in heat waves are not directly related to local carbon dioxide emissions or local greenhouse gas emissions. They're tied to global emissions because carbon dioxide is a well-mixed well spread gas. The changes we are seeing now that is about-- if you look at global mean temperatures, the change of 1, 1.1 degrees Celsius that we have reached right now is a response to the cumulative carbon emissions from 1850s until now, how?
The US, Europe, Russia, Japan all how contributed largely into that basket and now China and India has joined the bandwagon in the recent period, and we all are together in the blame game. The problem is that the carbon dioxide have a long lifespan, so even if we stop all the emissions right now, the carbon dioxide is going to stay in the atmosphere for the next hundreds or thousands of years. India need to act urgently, US need to act urgently, so that we can stop these extremes from accelerating further.
None of the commitments nationally determined commitments from the US, Europe or any other nations are sufficient enough to stop the global warming to from picking to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 and we are looking at 2 degrees Celsius by 2060. With 1 degree Celsius itself, we are having heatwave cyclones, heavy rains and floods due to monsoons and droughts as well, and South Asia is the most wonderful region with the largest population. Even as a climate scientist, I can imagine the [unintelligible 00:24:00] of 2 degrees Celsius, the doubling of that scenario.
Brian: We have to leave it on that note for our climate story of the week for this week with Roxy Mathew Koll, Climate Scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India, and elite author of the IPCC's sixth assessment report. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining to our US listeners what's going on in India right now, how extreme it is, and how it's related to climate change. We appreciate it a lot.
Dr. Koll: Thanks a lot, Brian. I enjoyed particularly the listener questions and many of these questions were excellent questions. We need to act urgently both on global levels and also local levels. Thanks a lot.
Brian: Thank you.
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