India and Pakistan sizzle, but it's about to get worse
Across a wide swath of the Indian subcontinent, scorching temperatures have damaged harvests. People are suffering from heat stroke. And the lights are flickering in some cities amid surging demand for air-conditioning.
Now, the heat wave that has been pummeling India and Pakistan for weeks is expected to intensify over the weekend. In some hardhit areas, it may be weeks before the region's annual monsoon sweeps in to provide relief.
Heat-related watches were in effect 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 today.
The heat wave poses health and logistical challenges for manual laborers, farmers, firefighters, power engineers, government officials and others, particularly in areas where air-conditioning service is scarce.
“Our condition is not good,” said Sawadaram Bose, 48, a cumin and wheat farmer in Rajasthan, where temperatures climbed to 112 degrees this week.
He and his family are only leaving the house before 11 a.m. or after 5 p.m., he said, and never without a water bottle or head and face coverings.
The temperatures are well above normal.
The subcontinent's scorching weather is a reminder of what lies in store for other countries in an era of climate change. Climate scientists say that heat waves around the world are growing more frequent, more dangerous and lasting longer. They are certain that global warming has made heat waves worse because the baseline temperatures from which they begin are higher than they were decades ago.
“Extreme heat is obviously one of the hallmarks of our changing climate,” said Clare Nullis, an official at the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency that certifies weather records at the international level.
It is too early to say whether the current temperatures in India or Pakistan will lead to any national-level weather records, she added.
In India, where forecasters said that March was the hottest month the country has witnessed in over a century, the National Weather Forecasting Center said this week that temperatures in some states were 10 degrees or more above normal in some areas.