India and Pakistan Welcome You to the Very, Very Hot Future

The future of climate change is here. Or at least it’s here if you’re in India. Or Pakistan.

About one billion people in these countries have suffered punishingly hot days in the past couple of months, and particularly in the last week — temperatures of 103 degrees Fahrenheit and higher across the board, except in areas where the heat reached a merciless 110 degrees and up. West Bengal, writes journalist Somini Sengupta, which is “in the muggy east of the country, where my family is from, is among those regions where the combination of heat and humidity could rise to a threshold where the human body is in fact at risk of cooking itself.”

On May 1, in Nawabshah, Pakistan, the temperature reached 121.1 degrees. Scientists say that this is probably the hottest recorded temperature in the Northern Hemisphere so far this year. March maximum temperatures in India were the highest in 122 years. It has been so hot that a landfill in Delhi spontaneously caught fire a week ago and has been burning ever since.

ABC News in Australia spoke to a woman named Sunita who works and lives at the dump site. Sunita doesn’t get a break from picking through the trash to earn her living, even with the sweltering temperatures and the added heat from the ongoing burn.

“Our kids are very young,” Sunita said. “All of them are coughing and have pain in their heads.”

While the horrific reality of death by heat and humidity is a risk in these insane temperatures, so is that of the death of much-needed crops. Experts say it’s too early to know the full extent of the ravishment of heat on wheat crops, but some Indian farmers say they’ve lost 10 to 15 percent of their harvest because of the scorching of fields under “heat domes.”

In the last year or two in the United States, we’ve all become acquainted with the brutality of “heat domes,” which occur when “strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure ‘dome,’” writes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. Such domes are a contributor to India and Pakistan’s recent record-breaking heat.

It would be overly simplistic to say that this nightmare is singularly caused by climate change, although that’s definitely a part of it. As in India and Pakistan, for those of us in the normally moderate climate of the Pacific Northwest, 100-degree-plus temperatures last summer would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” according to a July 2021 report from the World Weather Attribution initiative.

Climate researchers say that the Pacific Northwest heatwave was a “very low probability event, even in the current climate which already includes about 1.2-degrees Celsius of global warming — the statistical equivalent of really bad luck, albeit aggravated by climate change.” Researchers also found that, while normally there would only be one chance of extreme heat like this in the region in 1,000 years, the event would still have been “at least 150 times rarer without human-induced climate change.”

We’re living in a time when hot gets hotter, even in the unlikeliest of places. The Pacific Northwest’s heatwave was about 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it would have been if it had hit at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the researchers found.

Ironically, whether in the Pacific Northwest or South Asia, the unforgiving heat has pushed citizens to crank up their air conditioners, thereby using more energy, which is primarily fueled by coal, which is a leading contributor to greenhouse gases. It’s a vicious circle. And with no simple fix in sight, there’s not much people — like Sunita in Delhi — can do but try to get through it.

“We are living here because we are forced to,” she said. “If we do not work and live here, then where will we go?“

Welcome to the future. The very hot future.