India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
Mr Robinson said he wrote his best-seller, published in 2020, as a warning. “The Ministry for the Future”, the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson
Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement.
Sustained exposure to a temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. The Indo-Gangetic Plain is one of the few places where wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C have been recorded
The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent.
It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on earth
Robinson imagines the heatwave he describes spurring transformative climate action around the world. That was “ludicrously unrealistic”, concluded Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist.
Yet without such action, it is hard to see what will stop one of the most dire promises of global warming becoming a horrifying reality.
The Economist 2 April 2023
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/02/global-warming-is-killing-indians-and-pakistanis
Middle East and North Africa is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
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