DIRE DROUGHT: A crippling drought in India highlights that country's vulnerability to climate
change.
Image: Flickr/niiicedave
India is in the midst of its second drought in four years, with rainfall roughly 20 percent below average nationwide. In the nation's agricultural areas of the west and north -- the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana and Maharashtra, for example -- the situation is far worse. In Punjab -- India's "food basket" -- rainfall is 70 percent below average.
"We know that the rainfall in August will not be able to fill the gap, and the problem is getting really serious," said Harjeet Singh, international climate justice coordinator at ActionAid. "The impacts on the ground in terms of food security are yet to be seen. Unless the government prepares, it could be really tragic."
Three-quarters of India's annual rainfall comes from the summer monsoons that occur between June and September. Once the rains begin, India's farmers sow their summer crops, mainly rice but also oilseed and sugar cane.
The agricultural sector lies at the core of Indian society. Sixty percent of the population works in agriculture, and it accounts for roughly a fifth of the country's gross domestic product.
Poor crop yields could affect domestic food supplies and risk triggering a government ban on farm exports, further rattling international commodity markets, which already have been anticipating lower yields due to the drought across the U.S. Corn Belt.
Early this week, electricity blackouts left more than half of India's 1.2 billion people without power, the largest such outage in world history. The country's electric generation capacity and grid infrastructure are notoriously lacking. But many experts say the drought served as a complicating factor. Less rain meant less hydroelectric power, and farmers turned to electric pumps to tap groundwater supplies and irrigate their rain-deprived pastures.
As damaging as the drought has been, though, scientists and environmental experts warn that it also brings into sharp focus India's long-term vulnerabilities to climate change.
Looking for the drought's cause
The drivers of India's monsoon are often confounding to climate scientists. Projecting the timing and intensity of the rainfall they produce involves significant scientific uncertainties, whether looking decades into the future or even a few weeks.
"It's quite a mystery to people," said Andrew Robertson, a scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. The best signal that monsoon rains might be particularly weak during a given year, he explained, is warm sea surface temperatures related to an El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. But, he added, even El Niño is a weak signal, and when its conditions are nascent, as they are now, it is very difficult for climatologists to develop a seasonal forecast with a high degree of certainty.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD), which issues seasonal monsoon forecasts, has come under criticism for not expressing these scientific uncertainties in its releases. Writing in The Hindu, R. Ramachandran said that it was possible for one to discern the agency's projections for the possibility of drought conditions appearing in some areas of India. But, he added, the IMD did not adequately explain the complexities of its climate models, which led observers to believe rainfall was projected to be normal.
"If this information is to be continued to be shared with the public, an exercise that began only in 1988, then the IMD must also take efforts to explain the probabilistic nuances of the forecast to the media and the public," he said.
Ramachandran pointed out that monsoon rainfall varies over decades and suggested that the monsoon might currently be in a "below normal" epoch of its naturally occurring variability.
See what we're tweeting about
5 Comments
Add CommentClimate change is definitely a contributor to the weather anomalies around the planet. In the simplest of terms - 'not' doesn't apply in a continuous system that absorbs a 40% uplift in GHGs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo government corruption or delayed infrastructure can plan or compensate for a 70% decrease in precipitation.
Claiming such a disconnect comes from voices that lack the basic understanding of the problem and the issues. Talking about reduction having no meaningful impact is deceitful - further intransigence and lack of response will result in continuing the increase in GHGs. That will further exacerbate the heating, the extreme events and pattern disruption, and sink acidification.
I would add to what you have written just the over all implication warmists project out that somehow drought has never ever happened before and somehow this one is worse than any other. I guess they never heard of the dust bowl or perhaps the just ignore it because it is inconvenient to bring it up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides India's lack of infrastructure and rampant corruption, the fact they use major rivers as toilets, bath tubs and cemeteries is not helping either. Even if they built the infrastructure, they would just be moving polluted water around anyway.
This just adds to your main point, India's problems are not the result of some fantasy human induced global warming and they are not somehow just hapless victims of global warming.
Further, drought is just part of the natural cycle that has benefits as well as downsides. See the articl below. Rare Success: Critically Endangered Gharial Crocodiles Have Record Hatching Year. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/08/03/endangered-gharial-crocodiles-record-hatchings/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe American Western coast has been having quite good weather. But aside from Western Canada, have you noticed what's happening in the rest of the US?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDrought is natural. The frequency and intensity of 'weather' events is not.
Where, when, and how much precipitation there is depends on how much energy is in the climate system and how it is distributed. Changing the content of GHGs changes not only the amount of energy in the system, but how it is distributed. To claim otherwise is to exhibit a fundamental ignorance of the basic processes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this