Is India’s Heat Wave Climate Change?

by Emily Atkin



Emily says so below.  I am sure Emily is a dear little soul but she would fail basic logic.  As I wrote a couple of days ago about India:   "Just one problem:  Even Warmist scientists admit that there has been no terrestrial warming for 18 years.  So how can something that doesn't exist cause anything?"

But I am a lover of the facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts so let me mention something more.  The graphs below say it all. India has just come out of an unusually COLD and wet winter.  It looks like we are just seeing some sort of bounceback.  Emily did not look very deeply did she?





Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo emails:

TEMPERATURES IN INDIA WERE WELL BELOW NORMAL THIS WINTER AND MOST OF SPRING AND IT WAS UNUSUALLY WET. NORMALLY THE HEAT PEAKS IN THE SPRING WHICH HELPS DRAW IN MONSOON MOISTURE WHEN THE JET STREAM LIFTS NORTH OF THE HIMALAYAS STARTING BY EARLY JUNE. THE COOLER APRIL AND EARLY MAY COMBINED WITH EL NINO AND A DEVELOPING POSITIVE INDIAN OCEAN DIPOLE TO FAVOR A DELAYED AND LIKELY ERRATIC MONSOON YEAR. IS THAT NEW - HELL NO - SIR GILBERT WALKER WENT TO INDIA IN 1904 TO TRY AND FIND OUT WHY THE MONSOON FAILED IN SOME YEARS (LIKE 1899) AND HE FOUND THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION (PRESSURE FLIP FLOP DARWIN TO TAHITI) THAT MUCH LATER (1960S) WAS CONNECTED WITH THE OCEAN TEMPERATURES IN EL NINO SOUTHERN OSCILLATION. AND 113.7F IS NOT AT ALL UNPRECEDENTED. WHEN YOU DELAY THE MONSOON AND HAVE THE HEAT COME LATE CLOSER TO THE MAXIMUM SOLAR (WHEN THE SUN IS OVERHEAD OVER INDIA), IT GETS HOTTER THAN NORMAL IN JUNE. WE ARE TRYING TO GET MORTALITY DATA FOR INDIA BECAUSE AS THE LANCET ARTICLE SHOWED 20X MORE PEOPLE DIE IN WINTER COLD THAN SUMMER HEAT. WE WOULD BET THAT 20-30,000 PEOPLE DIED THIS WINTER IN INDIA FROM THE COLD

Isn't it nice to have some informed comment -- even if it is in meteorological capitals?

But wait! There's more! (As the salesman said).  The number of 40C days in New Delhi peaked during the first two years of their GHCN temperature record - 1944 and 1945.  See below:



And even more:  I am reading an academic journal article about extreme weather in India.  And I read: "On 10th May, the maximum temperature at Gannavaram (Vijayawada) reached 49.0C" (p.178).  That was in 2002, when global warming had stopped.  But the maximum temperature reported by the dear soul below was 117.3 Farhenheit, which is 45.3 Celsius.  So it was actually hotter in 2002 than in 2015!

Aren't facts pesky things?


A searing and continuing heat wave in India has so far killed more than 2,300 people, making it the 5th deadliest in recorded world history.

If the death toll reaches more than 2,541, it will become the 4th deadliest heat wave in the world, and the deadliest in India’s history. As temperatures soared up to 113.7 degrees Fahrenheit and needed monsoon rains failed to materialize, the country’s minister of earth sciences did not mince words about what he says is causing the disaster.

“Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon,” Harsh Vardhan said, according to Reuters. “It’s not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change.”

According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, India is getting hotter as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. With these increases in heat, the report — produced by 1,250 international experts and approved by every major government in the world — said with high confidence that the risk of heat-related mortality would rise due to climate change and population increases, along with greater risk of drought-related water and food shortages.

While he said it was too soon to directly attribute India’s current heat wave to climate change, University of Georgia atmospheric sciences program director Marshall Shepherd agreed that climate change is having an influence on many extreme heat events across the world.

“Attribution of events to climate change is still emerging as a science, but recent and numerous studies continue to speak to heat waves having strong links to warming climate,” Shepherd said in an email to ThinkProgress. He cited a 2013 report from the American Meteorological Society (of which is is the former President), which showed that in some cases, extreme heat events “have become as much as 10 times more likely due to the current cumulative effects of human-induced climate change.”

Blah, blah ...

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).