Climate change likely raises risks of brutal heatwaves by 30 times

Study of long-running hot spell in Pakistan, India shows probable link to warming

- Debarshi Dasgupta

In New Delhi Heatwaves such as the brutally long one over parts of India and Pakistan this year, which has claimed 90 lives so far and resulted in crippling power shortages and reduced crop yields, are about 30 times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

This was the finding of a study released on Monday by an international team of 29 climate scientists under the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Their analysis showed an event like the current heatwave is rare, with the probability of one occurring once every 100 years, but also revealed that human-induced climate change since the pre-industrial era has made it about 30 times more likely, implying it would have been "extraordinarily rare", a one-in-3,000 years event, without the impact of climate change.

To understand how climate change would impact the long-running spell of high temperatures in India and Pakistan, the scientists used data from the region and computer simulations to compare the climate as: is today, factoring in a 1.2 deg C global warming since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past.