April Heat Wave in South Asia Made 30 Times More Likely by Climate Change
April Heat Wave in South Asia Made 30 Times More Likely by Climate Change — Yale E360 April 18, 2023 temperature anomaly across South Asia and Southeast Asia in degrees C. WeatherBELL Deadly heat and humidity across India, Bangladesh, Laos, and Thailand in late April was made significantly more likely by climate change, scientists say. In parts of Bangladesh, temperatures soared to 105 degrees F (40.6 degrees C), while several Indian cities saw highs of 111 degrees F (44 degrees C). Laos and Thailand recorded temperatures up to 109 degrees F (42.9 degrees C) and 114 degrees F (45.4 degrees C), respectively, all-time highs for both countries. The hot spell led to a spike in heat strokes across the region. According to an analysis from World Weather Attribution, warming made the heat wave in India and Bangladesh 30 times more likely. In Southeast Asia, scientists say, the extreme heat and humidity would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change. The highly unusual weather shows the “huge impact of climate change on heat,” tweeted Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and coauthor of the analysis. Despite the growing threat of extreme heat, she added, only one of the four countries studied, India, has heat action plans in place. The Earth has warmed by around 2.2 degrees F (1.2 degrees C) on average since the preindustrial era. If warming reaches 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), the analysis found, the severe heat and humidity seen in April will become three times more likely in India and Bangladesh and 10 times more likely in Laos and Thailand. ALSO ON YALE E360 A Golden Spike Would Mark the Earth’s Next Epoch: But Where?
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.