India’s Extreme Heat Is a National Emergency
Dr. Soumitra Das
India’s Extreme Heat Is a National Emergency
India is emerging as one of the hottest regions on Earth. With 19 of the world’s 20 hottest cities, this is no longer a passing crisis—it is a national emergency demanding urgent, coordinated action.
Why Northern India Is Burning
A dangerous convergence is driving this extreme heat:
Persistent high-pressure systems trapping heat
Weak western disturbances, reducing cooling rains
Dry soils, intensifying land heating
Urban heat islands, pushing temperatures up to ~7°C higher
Temperatures in parts of northwest India are already approaching 46°C in April—levels typically seen in peak May or June. This signals a dangerous shift toward earlier and longer heatwaves, increasing cumulative stress on people, crops, and infrastructure.
A Warning from History
The Great Famine of 1876–78 remains one of the deadliest climate-linked disasters in history. An estimated 5–10 million people died in India, part of a global toll that reached tens of millions.
While often attributed to a super El Niño, the real cause was more complex and more instructive:
A strong El Niño weakened monsoons
A positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) suppressed rainfall further
Atlantic variability reinforced global atmospheric shifts
This rare synchronization disrupted monsoons across India, China, and beyond.
But climate alone did not cause the catastrophe. Policy failure amplified it - colonial systems failed to respond adequately, turning drought into mass famine. This is a critical lesson often overlooked.
A Looming Risk: 2026–27
Today, we may be heading toward a similar convergence.
Climate outlooks indicate a meaningful probability of El Niño conditions developing in 2026, potentially of moderate to strong intensity, and potentially accompanied by a positive IOD during the monsoon season. While Atlantic conditions remain uncertain, the North Atlantic is already unusually warm, which can amplify global circulation effects.
The context today is fundamentally different: Global temperatures are already approximately 1.2–1.4°C higher than in the late 19th century.
This raises the risk of:
More intense heatwaves
Greater monsoon instability
Higher risk of drought, crop failure, and food price shocks
Geopolitical risks, particularly instability affecting energy and trade routes in the Middle East, could further compound the crisis.
Hope is not a strategy. Preparedness is.
From Reaction to Preparedness
Heatwaves are no longer isolated events—they are systemic shocks with cascading impacts on food, water, energy, and public health.
While Heat Action Plans have saved lives, they are not sufficient for the scale of emerging risks. The response must shift from crisis management to integrated preparedness: planning for heat, drought, and crop failure; strengthening food reserves and price stability; expanding water security through rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge; scaling climate-resilient agriculture, including agrivoltaics; and protecting vulnerable populations through targeted policies and safety nets.
Global risks add urgency. Geopolitical conflicts can disrupt energy, fertilizer, and food supply chains, driving price shocks and shortages. De-escalation is therefore essential for global food and economic stability.
Even without rare climate alignments, ongoing warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events.
COVID-19 offered a clear lesson: planning and execution save lives.
The Case for the Cooling Summit
This is why the upcoming India Cooling Summit in Delhi is critical to confront extreme climate risks and define actionable pathways to manage them.
We must accelerate solutions that can reduce temperatures in the near term, while strengthening long-term resilience.
The summit is not just a conference - it is a call to align science, policy, and action before the next crisis peaks.
A Defining Moment
India today stands where the world will be tomorrow.
The lesson from 1877 is clear: Climate shocks become humanitarian disasters when systems fail to respond.
Dave King
--<HCI Logo_reszied.jpeg>
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rob de laet
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Rob
Local and regional measures for cooling are vitally important to secure more benign conditions in those locations. But unless they increase albedo and/or outgoing longwave radiation they cannot, as I understand it, reduce global warming. Have I got that right? If so, where does the energy displaced from the cooled locations go? Is there a danger that it just makes the situation worse elsewhere?
If they do increase albedo and/or outgoing
longwave radiation are there any numbers available to illustrate
the areal extent of 3-5oC
local cooling required to make an
appreciable difference to GSAT?
Robert
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Jan Umsonst
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rob de laet
Tom Goreau
Not quite, because most of the heat is recycled lower in the atmosphere without reaching the Top Of the Atmosphere (TOA), where half the radiation goes out to space and half back down.
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rob de laet
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Rob
Thanks for that speedy and helpful response.
You've confirmed my understanding of what's happening here and the need to quantify the proportion of the heat transported to higher altitudes in the troposphere that ends up being reradiated to space. My guess is that it largely depends on the extent to which that rising heat reaches the Effective Radiation Altitude (ERA) which is about 6km. That part that doesn't reach this altitude I would expect is no more likely to escape to space than if it remained close to the surface. Below that altitude, convection (and perhaps a little conduction) will recycle the heat within the troposphere and even be reabsorbed at Earth's surface. The heat absorbed and reradiated will mostly be directed in every direction other than directly upwards towards space, and most of that will encounter a GHG molecule on its way outwards if emitted from below ERA.
I'd need a bit more comfort before relying on 'a lot for sure' being material. To be clear, local cooling can be vitally important for communities and agriculture under heat stress, but it seems to me that claims that it contributes significantly to global cooling need to be treated with some circumspection.
Robert
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Tom
Where does that 'half' come from? Surely virtually all photons of longwave radiation that have made it to TOA from below are going to escape to space because there's virtually no matter there to interrupt their journey outwards.
Robert
Tom Goreau
The location of the radiation source is critical. Top of atmosphere molecules radiate with spherical symmetry, so there half goes up and half goes down (at least in a one dimensional model, you can have some fun with that, but it works fairly well because the atmosphere is so thin compared to the size of the Earth!). Lower in the atmosphere much or most of that upward half won’t escape TOA, but be absorbed or recycled driving atmospheric motion and water condensation.
rob de laet
Dr. Soumitra Das
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Mike & Tom
I think we must be talking at cross purposes.
The statement from Tom that I reacted to was 'most of the heat is recycled lower in the atmosphere without reaching the Top Of the Atmosphere (TOA), where half the radiation goes out to space and half back down'. This was compounded by the later remark that 'Top of atmosphere molecules radiate with spherical symmetry, so there half goes up and half goes down'.
Since I know you guys know what you're talking about and I'm new to all this, my challenge is to make sense of what you're saying.
I have no problem with the statement (A) that 'top of atmosphere molecules radiate with spherical symmetry, so there half goes up and half goes down' so long as it refers only to radiation that actually collides with a GHG molecule at TOA. I also have no problem with (B) 'most of the heat is recycled lower in the atmosphere without reaching the TOA', although see comment below.
But I do have a problem with (C) 'where half the radiation goes out to space and half back down' in reference to radiation reaching TOA.
A and C are only consistent in relation to radiation that actually collides with a GHG molecule at TOA. For radiation that escapes to space at TOA there is no back scattering, 100% of the energy escapes. However, since, as Tom notes, the atmosphere at TOA is very thin, almost none of the radiation reaching TOA actually collides with a GHG molecule there, so almost all of it escapes to space.
So for me to make sense of all this, I want to replace A by 'because there are very few molecules of GHG at TOA the vast bulk of radiation reaching TOA escapes to space and very little is back scattered into the lower atmosphere.' For C i also want to make it clear that this applies only in respect of the very few photons of infrared that collide with GHGs at TOA.
For Tom's statements to be true as written would require the TOA to be a continuous shield of GHGs so that every photon of infrared reaching TOA had half its reradiation back scattered, and half scattered to space. That would imply that longwave radiation never travels directly through TOA to space because if it did, 100% of its energy would escape, not just 50%. I can't believe that that's what Tom intended.
On the other hand, if the focus was shifted to ERA, the situation would be very different and Tom's comments would then not offend my nascent understanding of all this.
Referring back to B, it implies that the radiation is continuously being recycled and never reaches TOA. My understanding is that that's no so. What's happening is that it all escapes to space but just takes longer to do get there because of the increasing number of collisions and reradiations as the atmosphere becomes more opaque to OLR. However, because this is all happening more or less at the speed of light, it just means that the heat resides in the climate system for a little longer than it would otherwise and this is why it warms. It also explains why, as Earth warms, OLR initially decreases as the ERA increases and the emissions come from a cooler layer. Then, gradually as the increasing warmth spreads through the atmosphere, the temperature at the ERA increases and as it does, OLR increases to return EEI to equilibrium and stop further warming. In this way, the entire system equilibrates at a higher temperature that corresponds to the higher atmospheric opacity to OLR. That process takes a long time to complete - roughly a third in a decade, a third in a century and a third over millennia.
OK, now tell me what I've got wrong here! This is a steep learning curve for me.
RobertC
Hi Robert--Just to note that I agree completely with Tom--well said.
Mike
Tom Goreau
Radiation out of the atmosphere can come from any level, not only the very top, but it is increasingly absorbed the lower in the atmosphere you go. Scattering is treated separately from emission because it depends on the physical properties and distribution of whatever scatters it. Hope this is clearer.
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Rob
Thanks for sharing this paper. This is part of my learning process, so if what I've said below is rubbish, please be gentle!
It includes this statement (emphasis added):
Therefore, the additional global warming of the total Earth surface over the course of a year amounts to the seemingly gigantic number of 2.91109x1022 watts. Taking just the latent heat capture of the Amazon rainforest encompassing 5.75 million square kilometres and assuming all that energy is dissipated to Space, we obtain the number 2.92025x1022 watts. That number is remarkably close to the extra warming. Theoretically, and adding in the cloud-cooling effect described in 5), by reforestation we could cool the planet within a matter of decades.
That's quite a big assumption! Is there any evidence to support it?
You also say (emphasis added):
We calculate that the water-vapour transport of evapotranspired latent heat from the forest canopy to the upper troposphere and its subsequent irradiation to Space as infrared electromagnetic radiation may have brought about a cooling at least 100 times and possibly as much as 200 times greater than the cooling from biomass-forming and its role as a carbon sink. Indeed, if it were not for that transport of latent heat energy to Space, the upper atmosphere would have accumulated more and more heat, which is clearly not the case.9
A couple of observations here. First, it is referenced to the Harde paper. This is not my domain so I won't comment on its substance but it does concern me that one of its conclusions, highlighted in the Abstract, is that the IPCC estimate for ECS is about 30% too high. That seems unlikely in the light of more recent work, particularly by Hansen, saying exactly the opposite, and that ECS is closer to 5oC than 2oC. Second, my (limited) understanding of the energy fluxes from evapotranspiration is that the extent to which they affect outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to space is very dependent upon local circumstances such that on occasions it increases it and other times it decreases it. It is far from clear to me that there is sufficient information here to be confident that exploiting the heat pump effect of forests is feasibly scalable to increase OLR enough to make a worthwhile contribution to stopping and reversing global warming. I have no issues about it delivering local cooling benefits, but that's a different claim.
Regards
Robert
Hi Robert,
please find enclosed the cooling calculations for the Amazon which we published 3 years back. Now first of all you cannot compare that with sun baked Northern India and Peter and I have had quite some argument with Ali Bin Shahid on the numbers. No time to explain but if you would take half of the cooling I think you are safe. Mind you, this goes for large contiguous rainforest, large enoug to recycle rain and kickstart the biotic pump. In India of today few areas would fit this profile, perhaps some areas on the west side of the Western Ghats and some foothills North of Bangladesh.
Best,
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br...@chesdata.com
Hi Rob -
I am puzzled by your estimate that restoring an area of about 3 million km² [0.3 billion hectares] would decrease the global temperature by 1°C1. By looking the change in tropical forest area and the temperature increase since 1850:
- From 1850 to 1970 the tropical forest area decreased by about 0.64 billion hectares while the temperature increased about 0.2°C2,3
Historical Forest Cover and Temperature Increase Correlation
Years | Forest Cover Decline (Billion Hectares) | Temperature Increase |
1850-2070 | 0.64 | 0.2°C |
2070-2024 | 0.31 | 1.2°C |
- From 1970 to 2024 the tropical forest area decreased by about half as much, while the temperature increased by about six times as much (1.2°C) 2,3
- If tropical forests play such an important role in regulating the global temperature, why the large “mismatch” between the two date ranges?
- Restoring and area of about 3 million km would increase the forest coverage to about where it was in 1970 , when the temperature increase was 1.2°C less than it is today. If that alone would reduce the global temperature by 1°C, then the decrease in tropical forest area would be the dominant driver of the temperature increase and GHGs would only have a very minor role
What am I overlooking?
Cheers!
Bruce Parker
1 | This is more than a conservation effort—it’s a global call to action for our own survival and the well-being of generations to come. By restoring the Amazon, we are creating a model for reversing climate change worldwide. Restoring forests and transitioning to forest-like food production like agroforestry on an area of 2.5 – 3 million km² [0.25-0.3 billion hectares] in the tropical zone, the total impact will be 1°C of global cooling and a substantial reduction of extreme weather events. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2 |
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3A | ChatGPT: area of tropical forests from 1850 to 2024 Estimates of tropical forest area depend heavily on the definition used (e.g., all tropical forests vs. only primary humid tropical forests), but the broad long-term trend is clear: tropical forest area has declined substantially since the mid-19th century due primarily to agricultural expansion, logging, and infrastructure development. A reasonable synthesis from FAO, World Resources Institute, and historical land-use reconstructions is:
Approximate net change since 1850:
For humid primary tropical forests specifically (old-growth rainforest), losses are proportionally larger. Some estimates suggest:
Recent satellite-based assessments indicate:
Key references and datasets: One important caveat: older (1850–1950) estimates are reconstructed from historical land-use models and are much less certain than modern satellite-era estimates after ~1980.
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3B |
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3C | Historical Forest Cover and Temperature Increase Correlation
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robert...@gmail.com
Hi Tom
Maybe I'm just being a bit picky but I fear your brevity is glossing over important (to me) details.
Surely, almost no radiation comes from the 'very top', which I take to mean TOA. There's virtually no matter there to radiate anything. The radiation that's escaping at TOA comes from much lower. Yes, it can come from any altitude but the concept of effective radiation altitude (ERA) is intended, as I understand it, to capture an average of the heights from which emissions escape. The ERA is higher or lower according so the opacity of the atmosphere to IR due to the level of GHG concentration.
If that's more or less right, my comments below should stand.
Robert
Tom Goreau
Yes, and even more so, the wavelength of light, some doesn’t get far depending on the spectral absorption lines!
rob de laet
Hi Bruce,
A bit of history is in order. Peter has spent decades researching the dynamics of tropical rainforests and the regional climate work they do; the move to couple that surface cooling to a ToA cooling effect was mine, and it has turned out much more complicated than I assumed, with the EEI effect substantially smaller than the original number suggested. So the "1°C from restoring 3 million km²" figure as a global mean temperature claim cannot be reconciled with the temperature record, and I'm the one revising it. Funnily enough it doesn't change much about the actions we need to take to keep this planet habitable: in the end we live at the planet's surface, and that is where our food is grown and our water comes from.
On the surface-cooling side, Peter's recent experimental work (Experimental Evidence of Plant Thermoregulation and Its Implications for Climate Stability, 2025) shows that plants of multiple species actively regulate their leaf-surface temperature by modulating evapotranspiration, with leaf-surface cooling reaching as much as 20 °C below ambient under hot, bright conditions. That doesn't aggregate one-for-one to canopy or basin scale, but it does establish the mechanism: a vegetated surface is an active thermoregulator, and a denuded surface loses that regulation.
I should add that the land story is only half of it. Ocean biology: the phytoplankton communities that produce dimethyl sulfide and other precursors to cloud condensation nuclei, and the marine ecosystems that sustain them, is a major regulator of marine cloud brightness and therefore of planetary albedo. The IMO 2020 reduction in shipping fuel sulfur appears to have been a real-world demonstration of just how sensitive marine clouds are to aerosol supply, and it is one of the leading hypotheses for the anomalous 2023–2024 temperature jump. We are not going to avert wholesale collapse with land-based restoration alone. Forest protection and restoration on land, combined with ocean ecosystem recovery; protection of phytoplankton-supporting marine systems, reduction of pollution and overfishing, expansion of marine protected areas, are both necessary. Either one without the other leaves a major channel of biospheric climate regulation broken.
Which brings me to what has always been the reason I spend time on all of this. Peter is a real scientist; I have neither the brain nor the patience to be one. We share the same aim: pushing for action that will avert large-scale collapse of human societies in the decades ahead: the wholesale collapse of food systems, fresh water security, and habitable continental interiors within the lifetimes of people now living. Local and regional cooling from intact tropical ecosystems is undeniable and measurable; the heating and drying of deforested tropical landscapes is observable on satellite; the tipping cascades that propagate forest loss across thousands of kilometres are now formally modelled. These things are true even when the more ambitious global-cooling number isn't.
Once formulated, the corrected version of the argument is, I think, stronger rather than weaker. It just rests on regional habitability, tropical-specific biophysical cooling, ocean-biological cloud regulation, and tipping-cascade prevention rather than on a global temperature number that in the end is not a value that affects anyone directly. Local circumstances do.
Michael MacCracken
Hi Robert C--I'd say the problem is that you tend to talk about radiation generally rather than distinguishing between the upward and downward directed radiation. Add the adjective, and I think that will fix things. So, at any level, there is spherical radiation for a GHG, the upward directed heading to space and yes, is transmitted to space when it reaches the top of the atmosphere if not absorbed by a GHG molecule. So, the ERA is the spectrally integrated level for upward directed radiation.
At all levels, the spherical emissions of molecules also leads to downward directed radiation, etc. It tends to get absorbed a lot, until the downward directed radiation gets through to the surface.
Best, Mike
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Mike
Thanks for chipping in.
I have to confess that I don't know what it is that needs fixing. I completely understand that the radiation is spherically symmetric (i.e. is emitted equally in all directions) but I don't know which bit/s of what I wrote is/are unclear in that respect. It would help if you could point this out.
What I was trying to convey is that the spherically symmetric radiation is only relevant at the moment of emission (of the photon, not the GHG). Once each photon has been emitted it travels in a straight line either escaping to space or colliding with a GHG molecule en route. The higher in the atmosphere it is emitted, the greater the likelihood that it will escape to space. This is very unlikely the more below the ERA it's emitted, and increasingly likely the higher above the ERA it's emitted.
Your use of upwards and downwards seems to me a little arbitrary. Surely, the central question is not what direction the photon is travelling in but how opaque the atmosphere is along whatever path it takes. Even photons emitted vertically upwards towards the TOA will have to travel through GHG infested waters if they are emitted from relatively low in the atmosphere.
Robert
Michael MacCracken
Hi Robert--It is only the photos that go out in the upper half of the spherical probability distribution that can get to space (just to emphasize that the spherical distribution that Tom referred to is a probability distribution--any individual photon is headed in only a single direction like a rifle bullet). It is those headed in the upward half of the spherical distribution that are the ones I refer to as upward radiation. Photons emitted downward head in that general direction and a good share of those emitted at very low levels reach the surface. I think I have sent you the Trenberth energy balance diagram in the past. Look at how large the downward IR is to the surface--those are the downward moving photons.
rob de laet
Hi Robert,
On your observation about ECS and the Harde reference: you're correctly suspicious. We should not have leaned on Harde for that particular claim, and we're cutting that reference in the revision. I tried several times to reach him but he never answered my mails by the way. The "100 to 200 times greater than carbon" figure that the Harde citation supports is the same latent-heat-export claim addressed in your first point, and it falls for the same reason. I am letting it go and have to come back for a revision of amounts of cooling that are still substantial but a lot lower than these claims. It will take a bit of time to come to the final revision.
Warm regards,
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Mike
This conversation has strayed a long way from the Subject line above! But hopefully some may still find it interesting.
Your comment below provoked another question. When a photon collides with a GHG molecule it excites the subatomic particles in it and this causes it to warm. In warming, it also warms other molecules in the vicinity. Then, these newly warmed molecules reradiate more photons. Is that right?
If so, that suggests that multiple photons are reradiated from multiple molecules following the collision of one photon with one molecule. On the basis that, I assume, the total energy reradiated can't be greater than the energy in the original colliding photon, what does that say about the energy distribution amongst the reradiated photons? Do the reradiated photons individually have less energy than the original colliding photon? How does that work in relation to the wavelength of the emission? Also, when a molecule reradiates, does it emit just one photon or is is emitting a constant stream of photons anyway, just like any other black body above absolute zero, and the reradiation just adds the odd photon to that regular stream of photons? If so, is a molecule like a lunatic shooter with an automatic weapon firing a rapid stream of single shots all in random directions that have a spherically symmetrical probability distribution?
RobertC
Tom Goreau
Dear Robert,
Mike and I both agree that Trenberth’s book is the best introduction to all of these issues, but as you recognize, modelling interactions of radiation with aerosols is vastly harder than for pure gases because of all the physical and chemical complications.
Much better satellite measurements are needed to resolve model discrepancies and converge on reality, but the War on Science has tragically destroyed or incapacitated much of the instrumentation and data needed………..
Best wishes,
Tom
Date: Friday, May 8, 2026 at 05:46
To: Michael MacCracken <mmac...@comcast.net>, Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>
John Nissen
- As the Arctic warms faster than at lower latitudes, the temperature gradient is reduced and the energy driving the jet stream waves eastward round the planet is reduced. The jet stream waves meander more and get stuck in blocking patterns for longer periods of time. Both effects give rise to extremes of weather, compounded by global warming.
- As the NH relative to the SH, the ITCZ is moving northward and narrowing. This is affecting the timing of the monsoon and its intensity.
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John Nissen
- As the NH warms relative to the SH, the ITCZ is moving northward and narrowing. This is affecting the timing of the monsoon and its intensity.
Michael MacCracken
Hi Robert--
First, the absorption leads to vibrational energy stored in the vibrations of the various bonds, and rotational energy, also of the bonds. The absorption happens in particular wavelengths reflecting the energy increments that the vibrations and rotations suitable for the molecule. The movement of the molecule then leads it to collide with other molecules, sharing its energy.
Second, molecules emit energy (release a photon) based on the fourth power of their temperature--Stefan-Boltzman Law (so across a spectrum of energies). So, when they can (having gained energy by absorbing energy from a photon and/or through collision with other molecules), they do.
I'm not really competent to get into discussions relating to wave-particle duality, etc.
Best, Mike
Dr. Soumitra Das
Dear John, et al.,
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
We believe climate change must be addressed not only through resilience, but through a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy. At this stage, we need all four “legs of the table” working together:
Emissions reduction
Carbon sequestration
Rapid cooling through various forms of Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as a temporary stopgap measure
Climate resilience and adaptation
In another article, I discussed the enormous challenges of achieving net zero. While decarbonization will eventually happen, the timeline is far longer than the world can realistically afford. Carbon sequestration is equally important, though it too will require decades to scale meaningfully (Peter F. may hold a different view on this). We fully support both emissions reduction and sequestration as the primary long-term pathways to climate stabilization.
At the same time, we do not see a realistic pathway to stabilizing the climate within the next 30+ years through those measures alone. We are deeply concerned that the world could reach 2.5°C warming, or even higher, by mid-century, with catastrophic consequences.
This is why SRM and resilience become critically important. SAI deployment itself could take considerable time — if it happens at all, for reasons you know very well. Therefore, even within SRM, we must think in terms of short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategies. Less controversial approaches, such as localized surface albedo enhancement and Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), may play an important role while SAI readiness evolves through research, pilot programs, and governance frameworks.
At the same time, resilience measures will be essential in providing a safety net for vulnerable countries and populations. In other words, what we are advocating for is comprehensive climate planning that integrates mitigation, sequestration, SRM, and resilience into a unified strategy. Having said that, our primary focus at this moment is SRM, given the urgency of the climate crisis and the lack of viable pathways to stabilize the climate within the necessary timeframe.
For obvious reasons, India is a critical player in this space. If India begins to seriously explore and adopt SRM approaches, it could make it easier for other countries to engage as well. Ultimately, we believe the conversation must begin in India, with the ambition of bringing the countries of the Global South and willing parties into this effort alongside India.
Best regards,
Soumitra
Paul Klinkman
John Nissen
Hello Dana, at this rate by the 2030s India may not need a space programme anymore as we’ll simply launch satellites using ambient air temperature from Rajasthan.But jokes apart, India has survived millennia of climatic mood swings, monsoon tantrums, colonial famines, and politicians of every conceivable thermal category. We are annoyingly resilient people.
Also, if the planet reaches 2°C, it won’t be “India becoming hot” while others watch comfortably from air-conditioned moral superiority. The climate system is a fully integrated global partnership programme , with free international delivery of heat waves, floods, fires, droughts and insurance collapse.
So perhaps the real question is not:
“How hot will India become?”But:
“How long will humanity continue treating climate change like a Netflix documentary instead of a civilisational emergency?”On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 8:11 PM Dana Woods <danaj...@gmail.com> wrote:I wish more people in the US KNEW, and cared, about how much of a catastrophe the heat in India and some other parts of the global South is and how many Indian people and animals literally cook to death every year , and James Hansen predicts we'll be at 2 degrees C in the 2030s 😕 And then India will be HOW hot?On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 8:30 AM Dwijadas Ghosal <dgho...@gmail.com> wrote:HelloJohn,Geerings.I read your deeply thought-provoking write-up with great interest and thank you for that. I agree with your central concern that merely building “resilience” without addressing the larger climatic drivers may ultimately prove inadequate. Your observations regarding Arctic amplification, jet stream destabilisation and ITCZ shifts are indeed supported by a growing body of climate science and are increasingly relevant to India’s heat waves and monsoon anomalies.The linkage between reduced Arctic–midlatitude thermal gradient and persistent blocking patterns in the jet stream is particularly important and perhaps still under-appreciated in public discourse. Likewise, the possibility that monsoon dynamics are being altered by hemispheric asymmetry and ITCZ displacement deserves serious scientific attention.However, I feel caution is equally necessary when we move from diagnosis to planetary-scale intervention, especially Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). While the underlying radiative physics of SAI is scientifically plausible and volcanic analogues support its cooling potential, the climate system is highly nonlinear and regionally coupled. It is not merely control of temperature alone. South Asia’s monsoon is extraordinarily sensitive to land-sea thermal gradients and atmospheric circulation patterns. A cooling intervention focused in the Arctic or Northern Hemisphere could theoretically reduce certain heat extremes, yet may also unintentionally alter monsoon timing, intensity or spatial distribution in ways we still cannot confidently predict.There are also broader concerns like SAI does not remove greenhouse gases or halt ocean acidification.Long-term dependence could create “termination shock” risks.Governance, accountability and geopolitical tensions could become extremely serious if regional climatic disruptions emerge after deployment.Regarding the historical evidence of abrupt sea-level rise and submerged structures, I find the subject fascinating and certainly worthy of multidisciplinary investigation. However, some of these interpretations may still remain outside mainstream consensus and therefore require careful scrutiny before being used as foundations for major policy advocacy.That said, I strongly agree with your broader strategic point i.e. the Arctic is no longer a remote issue. What happens there increasingly influences the climate stability of India and much of the Northern Hemisphere. The world urgently needs both rapid decarbonisation and serious scientific discussion on emergency climate interventions , but under transparent international governance and rigorous global scientific assessment.Perhaps the wisest paths at present are aggressive emissions reduction,ecosystem restoration,adaptation and resilience, continued transparent SAI research, but extreme caution before deployment at scale.Your note raises important questions that deserve serious discussion rather than ideological dismissal.Warm regards,D. Ghosal
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Ron Baiman
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