NEW DELHI: India is now two and a half times more likely to experience a deadly heat wave than a half century ago, and all it took was an increase in the average temperature of just 0.5 degrees Celsius (less than 1 degree Fahrenheit), a new study shows.
The findings are sobering considering that the world is on track for far more warming. For the last two weeks much of Asia has been gripped by a heat wave, with a record high of 53.5 degrees C (128.3 degrees F) set in the southwest Pakistani city of Turbat on May 28 — the world’s hottest-ever temperature recorded for the month of May. Temperatures in the Indian capital of New Delhi have soared beyond 44 degrees C (111 degrees F).
Even if countries are able to meet the Paris Agreement goals in curbing climate-warming carbon emissions, that would still only limit the global temperature rise to an estimated 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). US President Donald Trump’s recent pledge to exit the Paris treaty won’t help.
“It’s getting hotter, and of course more heat waves are going to kill more people,” said climatologist Omid Mazdiyasni of the University of California, Irvine, who led an international team of scientists in analyzing a half century of data from the Indian Meteorological Department on temperature, heat waves and heat-related mortality.
“We knew there was going to be an impact, but we didn’t expect it to be this big,” he said.
Their study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, shows that, while India’s average temperatures rose by more than 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) between 1960 and 2009, the probability of India experiencing a massive heat-related mortality event — defined by more than 100 deaths — shot up by 146 percent.
The study also found that the number of heat wave days increased by 25 percent across most of India. Areas in the south and west experienced 50 percent more heat wave events, or periods of extreme heat lasting more than three or four days, in 1985-2009 compared with the previous 25-year period.
It’s harder to estimate how deadly future warming might be. There is no historical data for heat wave mortality at those peak temperatures, and death tolls could increase sharply as it gets even hotter.
“The general public may think that a 1 or 2 degree temperature rise is not that significant, but our results show that even small changes can result in more heat waves and more death,” said Amir AghaKouchak, another climatologist at UC Irvine and a co-author of the report.
Scientists have warned for years that climate change will make heat waves more intense, more frequent and longer lasting.
“It stands to reason there would be more dire health impacts with more severe heat waves, and this paper provides a key quantification of those impacts for one region of the world,” said climate scientist Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved in the study.
The same methodology can be applied in any region to get a sense of how vulnerable a country or population might be, the authors said.
They accounted for India’s fast-rising population and income levels in the analysis, to make sure neither affected the results. In the case of income, they found an even stronger correlation between heat waves and deaths among those who are poor.
That’s bad news as India is already seeing new deadly highs. Last year in May, India recorded a record 52.4 degrees C (126.3 degrees F) in the western city of Jaisalmer.
The vast majority of India’s 1.25 billion people are poor and have few options as temperatures hit sweltering levels, drying forests and riverbeds and wiping out farm animals. They are unlikely to have air conditioners — up to 25 percent still have no access to electricity.
Most in India rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, and climate change is likely to hurt their crops.
Many who work as farmers or in construction will have to shorten their work days by 2-3 hours within four decades, simply because it will be too hot outdoors, according to a report last year by the UN Environment Program.
Most Indian cities and states are not prepared to handle more heat, even if they understand the devastation it can wreak. In 2010, some 1,200 people died in a heat wave in the western city of Ahmedabad, prompting city officials to introduce seven-day weather forecasts, extra water supplies and cool-air summer shelters.
After more than 2,500 were killed in heat-ravaged areas across India in 2015, nine other cities rolled out a plan to educate children about heat risk, stock hospitals with ice packs and extra water, and train medical workers to identify heat stress, dehydration and heat stroke.
But the nine cities cover only about 11 million people, not even 1 percent of the country’s population.
“Heat wave stress is a relatively new aspect that hasn’t been recognized” as a climate change threat in the region, said scientist Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. In Bangladesh, “we are seeing more heat waves, there’s no doubt about it. And there is strong anecdotal evidence that we are seeing a similar trend in mortality. I would recommend a similar study here.”
Study: India's rising temperatures are already deadly
Study: India's rising temperatures are already deadly
Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case
- A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.
Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.
The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.
Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.
Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine
MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.
China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait
- The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait
BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight
KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.
