Two-thirds of the earth’s population depend on the Asian Monsoon to supply water for agriculture and drinking. In India there is alarm that the rains have not arrived, and the implicit question of whether the delay is an effect of global warming.
Matt Wade reporting for The Sydney Morning Herald recounts that:
MILLIONS of Indian farmers are looking anxiously to the skies and wondering where the monsoon has gone.
Five weeks into the annual wet season, many parts of the subcontinent have a serious rain deficit. Among the worst hit is the northern state of Punjab, a region known as the breadbasket of India.
The capital, Delhi, has been badly affected, along with large parts of the poverty-stricken states Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The elusive monsoon threatens to cause economic and social damage at a time when India was congratulating itself for weathering the global financial crisis better than most countries. At last week’s meeting of world leaders in Italy, India made it clear it would not be deterred from pursuing high rates of economic growth despite the challenge of climate change.
There are reports that monsoon-dependent crops in the north of the country have already been spoiled because of very hot weather and a lack of rain. Fears of a below-par monsoon in some of the most important farming districts have triggered a sharp rise in fruit and vegetable prices. This threatens to hit poor families the hardest.
The Meteorological Department, which issues a daily monsoon report, says the monsoon made a comeback last week but it admits rain has been “scanty” in some of the most productive food growing areas.
The fitful monsoon has created havoc in India’s biggest city, Mumbai. Over the past fortnight the metropolis has been plunged into chaos by flash-flooding caused by heavy downpours. However, a lack of rainfall in the city’s catchment areas has created a critical water shortage. Mumbai’s civic authority is so worried that it imposed a 30 per cent cut in town water last week and has stopped supplying water to non-essential services such as swimming pools.
There are reports the city may have only 20 days of water left unless the catchment areas receive more rain.
Could the failure of the monsoon to appear be a product of climate change? Ranjit Devraj, for IPS reports:
“There is growing evidence to suggest that climate change is making the monsoons more unpredictable and worsening the severity of events like floods and droughts,” Vinuta Gopal, energy and climate change campaigner for Greenpeace, told IPS.
Gopal says that while there is no scientific evidence yet to link this year’s truant monsoon to climate change, what is clear is that the “modelling systems of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) cannot make predictions with any degree of accuracy.” This means that farmers cannot depend on the forecasts to time sowing, harvesting and all that goes in between.
“Farmers we [Greenpeace] spoke with in the four southern states [Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka] told us that even traditional methods of forecasting have become undependable,” Gopal said. “What is certain is that the intensity and frequency of storms and spells of rain and drought are becoming commonplace, but exactly how precipitation patterns are changing is still to be worked out.”
The monsoon is notoriously difficult to predict:
Pradhan Parth Sarthi, a climate scientist with the prestigious Energy Research Institute, told IPS that the Indian summer monsoon remains a “complex and mysterious phenomenon” and that it is a hard task for any meteorologist to predict its course and precipitation “through existing statistical and dynamical models.”
“While climate change has little impact on average annual rainfall, going by rainfall data studied over a 100-year period, it is seen that during the monsoons heavy to very heavy rainfall is increasing in some areas and rainfall of lowered intensity is decreasing in other areas. These trends compensate each other in terms of net rainfall but they can be disruptive of normal agriculture,” Sarthi said.
El Niño (abnormal rise in sea surface temperature over the equatorial central Pacific Ocean), one of several factors that can delay or cause a failure of the monsoons, seems to have caused a 50 percent reduction in normal rainfall in June, Sarthi said. “We are hoping that the situation will revive in July, the principal rainy season, when El Niño weakens over the central, equatorial Pacific Ocean.”
“El Niño is already known to cause droughts and it will be fair to say that global warming may act to exacerbate these extreme events,” Sarthi observed.
“Although it is impossible to predict the effects of global warming on the frequency of El Niños, all indications seem to be that they are becoming stronger, more common, and are no longer disappearing completely,” says Kevin E. Trenberth, a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s scientific assessments of climate change. “In other words, the Pacific doesn’t seem to be reverting to ‘normal’ anymore,” Trenberth says in a report for the David Suzuki foundation.
For Gopal what is truly worrisome is a complacent attitude in which anomalous weather conditions are gradually becoming accepted as normal – and this despite a series of catastrophic events over the last few years.
However, should it be shown that the apparent disruption to the normal patterns of the monsoon are due to climate change there are two implications for the global response. Climate change would be shown to be an emergency with wide effects, and not as deniers such as Freeman Dyson claims limited to warming in the Arctic, with beneficial effects for Greenland. Secondly, India and China, will have to more seriously consider going cold turkey on coal, and to develop alternative energy sources. More generally that would mean the adoption of the policy of mitigation rather than the policies of adaptation, including perhaps Freeman Dyson’s science fiction of genetically-enhanced carbon consuming trees.