India is highly sensitive to climate change. The country faces more erratic monsoon patterns, more floods and droughts, and steadily shrinking Himalayan glaciers.

Monsoons and Floods

Monsoons are an essential part of the Indian climate, bringing months of steady rain to the subcontinent. In some of regions, up to 80 percent of all annual rainfall comes during the monsoons. In extreme cases monsoons also cause severe flooding, landslides, and human displacement, as well as crop and infrastructure damage. In July 2005, the heaviest monsoon rains ever recorded left almost a third of Mumbai, India’s biggest city and commercial capital, under water.

An article published in the journal Science states that heavy monsoons in central India have become more frequent and intense since the mid-20th century. The increase is probably linked to global warming.

Other scientists from Institute for Climate Impact Research fear that climate change could alter monsoon patterns leading to dry spells and droughts that could effect hundreds of millions of people.

More Droughts

Climate change could exacerbate water shortages especially during the dry season. India already struggles with water scarcity. The country has 16 percent of the world’s population, but only four percent of its water resources. Worst-case-scenario warming could cut per capita water availability in India by over a third by 2050. That could also mean annual crop yields to decline by around a quarter by the end of the century. The amount of dry spells in India could increase, particularly on the northwestern border with Pakistan, where water issues already cause bilateral tension between the two countries.

The area includes some of India’s most productive agricultural regions, such as Punjab and Rajasthan. According to a report by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), the threat of climate change to Indian agriculture lies not only in the physiological response of warming on crops. Many Indian farmers are also poorly prepared to adapt to changes in weather or crop yield. Food shortages could become worse in non-irrigated, rural areas that are dependent on increasingly unpredictable rainfall. Irrigated farmland could suffer from dried-out rivers and declining water tables.


What will the Earth's climate be like at the end of this century?

What's the old joke? Prediction is hard, especially about the future. What do you have to do to predict the climate of 2100? Well, you have to know how much CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, aerosols - that's dust and smoke - are going to be there, because that changes what we call the forcing - the pressures on the climate system - to be warmer or colder. We know it's going to be warmer. That's virtually certain.


But you don't know what those are going to be on the basis of any history. There's never been a time before when there were six to ten billion people on the Earth, when they're demanding dramatic increases in their standards of living, and when they're using the cheapest available technology - usually coal and oil burning, big cars - to get there. So, before you can forecast how warm it will be in 2100 - and whether it's worth a trillion-dollar investment not to have that outcome - you've got to know a bunch of social factors.



What kinds of social factors?


How many people are in the world? What standards of living do they have? That's population times GDP per capita - a typical measure of standard of living. Then you have to multiply that by how much energy per unit of GDP they consume. We call that energy intensity. It's critically important. And how do we know if people are going to take this problem seriously?

What are the possible climate scenarios for the end of this century?

Greenhouse gas concentrations double pre-industrial levels and then come down like a steep ski slope because we've invented our way out of the problem with new high technology, and we deploy it starting in 2020. By the end of the century we merely increased carbon dioxide by, say, 80 percent of pre-industrial levels. That, I'm sorry to say, is a good scenario.


The bad scenario is business as usual. We keep getting richer as fast as we can. We do what we did in the Victorian Industrial Revolution in the rich countries: sweat shops, coal-burning internal combustion engines. Well, what do you think China and India are doing?