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.”
Read more at ‘It Is Climate Change': India’s Heat Wave Now the 5th Deadliest in World History
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