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.

--

Soumitra Das

Chairman and Executive Director, HCI USA

Chairman, HCI India

https://healthyclimateinitiative.org/

[Dr. Soumitra Das]

Dear Sir David,

Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement. It means a great deal coming from you.

And thank you for the important correction. You are absolutely right — I will revise the article to include 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era.

I am greatly encouraged by your suggestion to publish it in the Indian press and will certainly pursue that. I am also seriously hoping the summit can help engage the government and key stakeholders in developing comprehensive planning to manage escalating climate risks, especially extreme heat.

With warm regards,

Soumitra

Soumitra Das

Chairman and Executive Director, HCI USA

Chairman, HCI India

https://healthyclimateinitiative.org/

On Wed, May 6, 2026, 2:47 AM Dave King <d...@camkas.co.uk> wrote:

Dear Soumitra,

That is a really excellent article. It should be published in the Indian press.

Just one minor point: the last 5 years show an average temperature rise for our planet of 1.5 C since pre-industrial era. 

Best wishes,

Dave

Sent from my iPhone

On 6 May 2026, at 02:55, Dr. Soumitra Das <mr.soum...@gmail.com> wrote:



<HCI Logo_reszied.jpeg>

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-planet-action...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/CADWMfET6FaSk1GmohG36O7mtv%3DeraFhBrchG9zTekpoCTm4VRw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Dave King]

Dear Soumitra,

That is a really excellent article. It should be published in the Indian press.

Just one minor point: the last 5 years show an average temperature rise for our planet of 1.5 C since pre-industrial era. 

Best wishes,

Dave

Sent from my iPhone

On 6 May 2026, at 02:55, Dr. Soumitra Das <mr.soum...@gmail.com> wrote:



<HCI Logo_reszied.jpeg>

[rob de laet]

Hi Soumitra, 

Yes, it is a national emergency, going in the direction of the opening chapter of the Ministery for the Future. I was in Medellin two weeks back and looked at how they cooled the city through regreening and other measures and applied AI to do a case study for Lucknow as an example. We can bring peak temperatures down 3-5 C with the right measures within years, the investments pay themselves back within one summer due to lower electricity bills. The co-benefits are: less coal burned, less stress on the grid and of course the health effects. 

Please take a look at the attached draft, 

Kind regards, 

Rob de Laet 

Project Lead Cooling the Climate

Member of the EcoRestoration Alliance

Fellow fo the Schumacher Institute

Planetary Solvency Taskforce

Co-founder of Senang Eco Services

WhatsApp: +55 71 992617846

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/9AE55C8B-5D95-4758-B629-DF417C3A6ED8%40camkas.co.uk.

[John Nissen]

Dear Soumitra,

Climate change

I fear that you are fighting a losing battle if you intend to deal with climate change through resilience, though India would not be alone.  We need to look at the cause of the extreme weather that you and many countries in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) are facing, and find whether the trend towards ever worse extremes could be reversed.  I suggest two places to look: jet stream behaviour and movement of the Inter-tropical convergence zone, aka ITCZ.

• 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.

To reverse these effects, the NH needs to be cooled, preferentially in the Arctic.

Loss of Himalayan ice

You have pointed out that 2 billion people depend on the Himalayan glaciers for their water supply.  The glaciers need to be preserved and their retreat halted.  Some local measures are possible and I know you are considering them.  But in the longer term a general cooling of the NH is going to be necessary.

Sea level rise and flood risk

Flood risk in the great deltas comes from a combination of swollen rivers (with more extreme rainfall and glacier meltwater) and sea level rise. This combination could be as serious a threat for India as the heat and water shortages.  The immediate priority must be to halt the meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which threatens to partially collapse and suddenly raise the sea level around the world by a half metre or more.  This is not some idle scary speculation but based on past behaviour, recorded by indigenous peoples of the Arctic from thousands of years ago, as Albert Kallio has discovered.  Major rises and falls in sea level have also been recorded by the ancient Egyptians in writings which Albert has deciphered through amazing diligence.and insight.  Furthermore he points out the remarkable remains of buildings submerged by many metres off the coast of India - buildings which must have been subject to a very rapid rise in sea level.  Further back in history there was a rise of 20m in 400 years at the beginning of the Holocene, likely triggered by a temperature rise of 7-10 C in the Arctic over a 50 years - ominously similar to what we are seeing today.

Action for India in collaboration with European countries and Canada

We can see from above that an urgent priority must be to lower the Arctic temperature which can only be done using the most powerful available cooling technique, SAI.  Since the US administration wants to exploit the Arctic, AND is in denial of climate change, AND is dismissive of science, there is no immediate hope for the US to deploy SAI to refreeze the Arctic.  But other countries could act together as a super-power to refreeze the Arctic and lower the NH temperature, for the benefit of their own citizens as well as of the rest of the world.  The best prospect for collaboration might be a combination of India with west European countries and Canada, but I would not rule out China.  Can you help me promote this idea for India?

Cheers, John

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Planetary Restoration" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to planetary-restor...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/CADWMfESE_qiYRZpoe__KjX6P5L%2BeH%3DUYPcfb078f5DhoL9vBhw%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Nissen]

Oops,

• 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.

[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:

1. Emissions reduction

2. Carbon sequestration

3. Rapid cooling through various forms of Solar Radiation Management (SRM) as a temporary stopgap measure

4. 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

[Dwijadas Ghosal]

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

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-ini...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-initiative/CACS_FxpmUumWqbuNxm%3DWgjiyHBgeCwGitZBs%2BADHrNKB5cMPKQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Dana Woods]

I wish people in the US and Europe knew how bad the heat is in India as well as in other parts of the global south and how soon it will sadly likely be unlivable barring a "miracle" James Hansen says we'll be at 2C in the 2030s (he may have said mid 2030s) and then how hot will India be ?

Dwijadas I'm a bit out of the loop (maybe someone can refresh my memory of what Doug McMartin's proposed SAI strategy is?) but there are models for SAI (by David Keith et al and maybe others too) that show if it's implemented uniformly across the globe SAI won't cause changes in the monsoons in the South nor any extra extreme weather events anywhere. 

In any case we need to start doing FIELD TRIALS yesterday !!!! 

Soumitra maybe we could get you interviewed on Western media to talk about your country's plight and the possible solutions for it and the world (?) 

Rob I'm all about restoring the Amazon too if that's possible (and I will contribute the little I'm able to to the linked project) Are you suggesting we can cool the planet several degrees by doing that alone though? From what I've been hearing from experts for years, including from Ye Tao , no amount of planting trees can make that much of an impact at this point 

~ Dana 

[Dwijadas Ghosal]

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? 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/CAATGafqO%2BFOw1aCv_dkoB68YQ2RJy4uhjMxG8v8CNqd0NT-5%3DA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Nissen]

Hi Dwijadas,

“How long will humanity continue treating climate change like a Netflix documentary instead of a civilisational emergency?”

The US government is certainly treating climate change as a documentary.  But so are many climate scientists, focussed on observation rather than prevention.  We need the governments who have a concern for the prevention of catastrophe for their citizens to come together and act to implement that prevention.  And we need scientists and engineers to come together and face up to the challenge of lowering temperatures everywhere, but especially in the Arctic because of the tipping elements there.

As a scientist and systems designer, I appreciate the amazing operation of the Earth System as a system.  The ES has been provoked by a huge pulse of greenhouse gases to move us away from the norms of the late Holocene, i.e. the last few thousand years.  The Arctic is a critical component of the ES.  Refreezing the Arctic is a way of nudging the ES back to past norms.

But the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the global average.  Refreezing the Arctic is going to require enormous cooling power to overcome the heating that the Arctic is receiving.  And that heating is increasing.  From an estimate of the cooling power requirements, it is clear that, of all the cooling techniques available, only Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) has the scalability and immediate availability for a reasonable chance of success.  Researchers on SAI, such as Doug MacMartin, have suggested how the Arctic temperature might be lowered, at reasonable cost.  The risks of undesirable effects seem to be manageable.  SAI could prove quite harmless if deployed sensibly.

So I am calling on all governments who wish to protect the lives of their citizens from catastrophic climate change and sea level rise to come together and collaborate on preparation for deployment of SAI.  The SO2 (aerosol precursor) needs to be injected at mid to high latitude to lower the Arctic temperature, so India might not be directly involved in initial deployment.  But  it could take part in the modelling and monitoring effort to ensure safe deployment from the beginning.  And it could develop supplementary cooling interventions, e.g. for maintaining Himalayan glaciers and for the local cooling of hotspots.

Cheers, John

[Dana Woods]

Dwijadas,

Yes but the truth is there are limits to human physiology (as you know) as well as to plant biology (photosynthesis stops in EVERYTHING in the low 100s F ) and I know that at least 100,1000 more people (and animals) in India are literally cooking to death than a few years ago even, or that at least has been the case some years recently  . People in the US have air conditioning and most people in India don't so at least for awhile surviving there will be much harder and Americans etc ought to realize how serious the situation is there, especially when we're one of the main countries who caused the warming and climate crisis 

To only REALLY care about it until it seriously poses an mass -death situation for the global North is passively acquiescing to a heat-caused genocide in India and other parts of the global South 

[Ron Baiman]

Thank you Soumitra. Excellent piece. Not surprisingly, I couldn't agree more! 

Perhaps these documents (that I think you and many of the respondents may have already seen - but just in case!) would also help with your efforts:

1)  "Open Letter in Support of Applied-Science Testing and Piloting of Near-term Global Climate Cooling Approaches" (submitted for publication to Oxford Open Climate Chnage and currently under review): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lw8sYuUGay8RYXsBqhJzwqJl7BKluCRI/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116465941111195452408&rtpof=true&sd=true

2) "Confronting Catastrophic Climate Risk: A Global Security Response" proposal for the 2026 RFF and Harvard SRM Social Science Research Workshop: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIgwoC5h9aROlsHsvEHgM5oQhaH3xmND/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116465941111195452408&rtpof=true&sd=true

3) And a simple, easy, and practical measure that India (or any other country or NGO with standing with the IMO (International Maritime Organization)) could take to encourage the IMO to consider using to offset some of the recent "warming termination shock" from well-intended, but not well thought out regarding their warming consequences: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/4/1/kgae008/7706251?searchresult=1

Best,

Ron

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Healthy Climate Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to healthy-climate-ini...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-initiative/CADWMfET6FaSk1GmohG36O7mtv%3DeraFhBrchG9zTekpoCTm4VRw%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Healthy Planet Action Coalition

YouTube Channel

@HPACoalition  (Bluesky and Twitter/X)

SAI Deployment and Risks to Human Civilization: The Question is No Longer If, but How, When, Where, and by Whom?

2025 Baiman, MacCracken and Slater. AGU Poster

On-line Conference_The Global Heating Emergency:_Preventing 2.0C by 2040: What's the Plan? 

Addressing the Urgent Need for Direct Climate Cooling: Rationale and Options

Baiman et al. 2024. Oxford Open Climate Change

An Open Letter to the IMO Supporting Maritime Transport that Cools the Atmosphere While Preserving Air Quality Benefits. Baiman et al. 2024. Oxford Open Climate Change