India Blames Heatwave Deaths on Climate Change

India, one of the key players in the efforts to reach an international agreement on global warming, has no doubt of its malign effects.  It was, says a government minister, the warming climate that caused last month’s devastating heatwave.

From mid-April till the end of May, nearly 2,200 people were killed by the heat − 1,636 of them in Andhra Pradesh, the worst-affected state.  The normal May figure for the whole of India is about 1,000 heat-related deaths.

Dr Harsh Vardhan, India’s Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, has blamed the heat deaths squarely on climate change.

Improve understanding
Launching a supercomputer at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting to improve understanding of climatic changes, he said:  “It’s not just another unusually hot summer − it is climate change.

“Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heatwave and the certainty of another failed monsoon.”

Dr Vardhan said that May’s heatwave, followed by the delay to the start of the monsoon, on which nearly half of India’s farmlands depend, was a definite manifestation of climate change.

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