The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gas has been causing heatwaves in India and Pakistan in recent times. At least 90 people have died in India and Pakistan in the scorching heat. According to the report of the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international group of climate scientists, if there was no human intervention, the temperature would have been one degree Celsius lower and it would have been 30 times less likely. Last week, according to an estimate released by the UK Meteorological Department, human intervention has increased the risk of extreme heat by a hundredfold.
These analyzes also pointed out that carbon pollution is already wreaking havoc on society. Due to the scorching heat, forests have been burnt in India, glaciers have started melting, due to which incidents of flash floods have increased in Pakistan and power outages have started in both the countries. Crop yields have also been affected.
According to Krishna Achyutakav, a scientist at IIT Delhi and co-author of the WWA research, “In terms of global temperature in future, obviously this type of heat wave will become more intense.” Experts have cautioned that the impact on the crop is particularly worrying. According to a report published last Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations agency for the study of weather phenomena, Ukraine’s links to conflict, climate, Covid and economic crises have already undermined decades of development in terms of food security. Was.
The number of half-eaters flattened in the 2010s, after a decades-long decline, but is projected to increase substantially in 2020. The Russian attack on Ukraine has disrupted grain exports from the world’s two largest wheat exporting countries. Earlier this month, India, the second largest producer of wheat after China, banned exports in view of heat-scorched fields and damaged crops.
Aditi Kapoor, a specialist in risk management at the International Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Center, involved in the WWA study, says that the wheat was hit by the scorching heat when the crop was about to be ready. It is estimated that it affected 10 to 30 percent of India’s wheat. At first the farmers were affected, and when the prices rose, the poor people who bought the food were affected.
A study published last year in the journal Energy Research and Social Science reported that between 1965 and 2018, 20 companies were responsible for a third of the warming of the Earth’s fossil fuel emissions and cement production. This also included the pollution of fossil fuels that these companies sold to third parties.
The four largest, investor-owned fossil fuel companies—Chevran, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell—were responsible for 11 percent of emissions. Heat wave can have an indirect effect on the global climate. It can melt glaciers and cause flash floods. One such flood caused severe destruction in Pakistan in May and bridges were washed away. Relatively warm air holds more moisture, which results in more heavy rain. While other climate factors may act differently.
Last week, northeastern states such as Assam and Arunachal Pradesh were mired in the twin ravages of heavy rains and heat. People have already warmed the earth by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In 2015, world leaders signed an agreement to try to cut global temperatures to 1.5 °C by the end of this century.
However, what is happening is that many countries are intent on policies that are almost twice the upper limit mentioned above. If global temperatures reach two degrees Celsius more, the risk of heatwaves that have hit India and Pakistan recently will be two to 20 times higher than today, and temperatures 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius higher, according to the WWA report.