We are living in a different climate reality, and it’s showing

It says something about the rate at which global heating is progressing that these days, whenever I’m out snorkelling or diving in a reef, I expect to see bleached corals. And quite depressingly that is the case: A sea of white coral fossils, interspersed with tiny patches of colour that are holdout corals, and a few confused fish swimming around in the underwater desert.

That was the picture that greeted me in May, while diving in the waters of the Andaman Sea near the popular tourist sites of Koh Phi Phi in Thailand. Although the islands and beaches were the very picture of a tropical idyll, the sea conditions in the region were clearly stressed. Apart from bleached coral colonies, the sea temperature itself was unseasonably warm. The record heatwave that had swept across South and Southeast Asia from March onwards had superheated the ocean waters as well. There were news reports in The Guardian of Thai officials warning of “boiling” seas in the region.

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Usually summer sea surface temperature (SST) in the Andaman Sea ranges between 26-29 degree Celsius. This April and May, these values were consistently over 30 degrees Celsius for weeks on end. Since water requires more energy to heat up than air, a sudden rise of 2-3 degrees results in a marine heatwave, and if such conditions persist, this immediately affects ocean health. In the tranquil lagoons and straits around Krabi and Phuket, this meant a rise in blooms of venomous jellyfish, bleached coral colonies and a weirdly warm sea. 

Nor was this an isolated incident, as around the same time, similar phenomena was occurring in the Bay of Bengal off Vishakhapatnam. Given such marine heatwave conditions in the Indian Ocean region, it wasn’t surprising that cyclone Remal formed in the Bay of Bengal in end-May, drawing on the unnaturally hot SST to become a destructive storm. While flying to Delhi from Phuket, I could see the intense low pressure zone to the south of the Bay, turning into a cyclone. 

Experiencing the effects of a warming planet on the ocean, firsthand, was fascinating, but also scary. Scary because it gives a true sense of the vastness of the earth system and the sheer scale of damage a disbalanced energy system can inflict on the residents of the planet. With climate change, humans are playing with fire. There’s a large degree of heating already built into the world’s physical systems because of the greenhouse gases that humans have already pumped into the atmosphere, but what is truly outrageous is the reluctance of the big emitting countries to stop adding to it. 

On 15 August, the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), announced that 2024 had the hottest July on record. This sort of announcement hardly surprises anyone anymore, because the previous 15 months had also been the hottest on record. We are now living in world that is radically different from even a decade ago, and as global heating mounts, the disruptions and changes will mount at an even faster rate. 

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Currently the official rise in global average atmospheric temperature is calculated at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. This is already a very dangerous high. In 2022, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had predicted a 50% chance of the world breaching the ‘safe’ warming threshold (temporarily) of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the latter half of this decade. Climate models predict a permanent global shift to 1.5 at around 2040. Given how we’re seeing extreme weather all over the world at just 1.2 degrees of warming, 1.5 is frankly unimaginable.

The thing is, climate patterns have already entered a new, unprecedented phase, one that human beings have never experienced as a species. And this is true for India as well. After successive years of extreme weather in the country, it is now safe to predict the main features of the new climate reality of our country.

The first is longer and more intense summer heatwaves. While daily temperature records may or may not be broken, the Indian summer has started turning deadly hot earlier in the year, and this long stretch of heatwave days are lasting longer, for months on end. Heat stress is also increasing, with a deadly cocktail of high humidity and high temperature severely threatening lives and livelihoods. This is then followed by marine heatwaves in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, meaning that there is at least one intense and destructive cyclonic storm before the onset of monsoon.

This in turn affects the monsoon itself, delaying its onset over the northern parts of the country, and, in combination with very high air temperatures over land, causing devastatingly heavy rainfall over peninsular India. Not that the monsoon months are bringing any real succour either, with the pattern of rainfall turning highly erratic—long stretches of dry days followed by intense, cloudburst-like rains that cause severe flooding. On top of that, the total amount of monsoon rain across the country is usually deficient. Meanwhile, microclimates over land are getting destabilized, with drought-prone areas turning flood-prone and vice versa.

In the Himalaya, glaciers are losing mass at higher rates, there’s less winter snowfall and more incidents of catastrophic rainfall events. Even regions like Ladakh are seeing the need to invest in ceiling fans, something entirely unheard of before.

Policymakers need to take note of the new climate reality in the country, especially when it comes to maintaining older infrastructure—like bridges that keep collapsing—or initiating new ones like ports and highways. Any new infrastructure, if created under the assumption of an older climate paradigm that no longer holds, can and will become death traps. Finally, India has not conducted a nation-wide climate assessment since 2020, nor have there been any state or city-centric assessments. This can only be called negligence. We need to do much better.

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