Nepal Archives - The India Climate Observatory

How El Niño plans to hijack monsoon 2015

May 26, 2015 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

Whether the monsoon starts off on time, whether the June, July, August and September rainfall averages are met, and whether the seasonal pattern of the monsoon is maintained are expectations that must now be set aside.

According to the Climate Prediction Center’s ENSO probability forecast, there is a 90% chance that El Niño conditions will prevail through June to August of the northern hemisphere and a more than 80% percent chance El Niño will last throughout all of 2015.

The Ministry of Earth Sciences El Niño/La Nina, Indian Ocean Dipole Update (10 May 2015)

What this means, especially when record warm global atmospheric temperatures (because we in South Asia and our neighbours in East Asia have continued burned coal as if the resulting CO2 and soot simply doesn’t exist) are being set, is the remaining months of 2015 – the monsoon period included – will bring strange, dangerous and extreme weather. We have already seen that over the last week, with the death toll from the heat wave having crossed 550.

For the first time since 1998 – the year of the strongest El Niño on record, which played havoc with the
world’s weather patterns and was blamed for 23,000 deaths worldwide – ocean temperatures in all five El Niño zones have risen above 1 degree Celsius warmer than normal at the same time. That is read by climatologists and ocean scientists as presaging an El Niño that is moderately strong to strong. The forecast models updated in May are now unanimous that El Niño is going to keep strengthening through the rest of 2015. (See also the official forecast from the USA’s government climate science agency.)

El Niño’s home is in the tropical eastern Pacific, but we in India need to watch the waters to our south very closely. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has examined records going back to 1950 and noticed that Indian Ocean absorbed heat at a low level until 2003. Thereafter, the excess oceanic heat in the Pacific Ocean found its way through the Indonesian archipelago and into the Indian Ocean. This is the gigantic reservoir of watery heat that is going to dictate terms to our summer monsoon, or what our school textbooks call the south-west monsoon.

It is a worry for the entire South Asian region – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives, Burma, Afghanistan and Bhutan. That is why when the Forum on Regional Climate Monitoring-Assessment-Prediction for Asia (FOCRA) issued its seasonal outlook for June to August 2015 it predicted weaker than normal Indian summer and East Asian monsoons. Precipitation over land is influenced by external factors such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (the ENSO), the ‘Indian Ocean Dipole’, the ‘Arctic Oscillation’, and so on.

There may be a “timely onset” of the monsoon, as the venerable IMD is used to saying, but that doesn’t mean our troubles are over. Far from it.

Climate measures that matter

October 8, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

India has been saying during the last several international negotiations about climate change that our country, like other ‘developing’ countries, has a right to development. What this means is India has officially said our country will continue to burn coal and petroleum products in quantities that contribute to India emitting 1.954 million tons of CO2 a year (this figure is for 2012).

The ‘developed’ world (mostly countries in western Europe and North America) point to this large quantity and demand that India (and China, which emits very much more) do something to halt this rise and to decrease it. India’s response has been – recognise what you have done from the time of the Industrial Revolution and then we’ll resume talking.

This is unlikely to result in any constructive recognition of all that is linked. A country’s total emissions is one part of the ‘development’ picture and others are at least as important. There are also tons of CO2 emitted per capita (India has often said that its per capita emissions are far below those of the West). And there is per capita consumption of electricity (which is still mainly generated by burning coal).

That is why, when we look at the relationship between these three measures for a country, and between countries for any one of these three measures, we see connections that are otherwise missed due to a focus on a single measure. Our diagram, ‘Climate Measures that Matter’, helps explain these connections. It can be used as an aide to understanding better India’s position at climate negotiations, and provides much-needed context to the arguments about a country’s total emissions and its per capita emissions. [See the statement by Minster for Environment Prakash Javadekar, at the United Nations Climate Summit 2014.]

This diagram is an aide to understanding better India’s position at climate negotiations. It provides much-needed context to the arguments about a country’s total emissions and its per capita emissions.

The country and energy data used in this diagram is for the latest year which is 2012. The source for the data is the International Energy Agency’s ‘Key World Energy Statistics 2014’ . This selection of countries compares countries of South Asia, East Asia, the larger economies of the OECD, the BRICS, other European countries, and countries of the Middle East. For each of the three measures, the size of the circles are relative to each other.

[The full size image is available here (png. 266kb). This diagram is distributed under a creative commons licence (2014) by the India Climate Portal. Reproduce only with full attribution.]

One could argue that the relationship between three measures for any country shows its responsibilities towards curbing the use of fossil fuels both nationally and individually, and towards capping electricity use. For example, per capita electricity use in a number of the countries shown in the diagram is seven or eight times more, and even ten times more and above, than India’s use.

Our South Asian neighbours – Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – have by all three measures relatively small global impacts. The size of our population and the depth of our industry and economy however has made India the third largest emitter of CO2 (after China and the USA). But if India seeks some sort of ‘parity’ in electricity use – or if India sees the low per capita CO2 emissions as a ‘development’ gap – our total contribution to CO2 emissions will only rise faster, hurting the environment that we share with our neighbours.

The diagram helps display some of the most glaring and conspicuous differences between countries’ impacts on the atmosphere and ecosphere. These differences can be taken to mean fuel use and consumption must be halted and stringently curbed, whether or not the Kyoto Protocol and a successor treaty exist. That would be the way of acting responsibly for a country. [See the text of the Joint Statement issued at the 18th BASIC Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change in August 2014.]

These differences can also mean that the ‘developed’ countries recognise – as we and many ‘developing’ and ‘less developed’ countries have been reminding them repeatedly – that the way their economies and societies have functioned has caused much of the problem in the first place, and they must stop shunting the onus of responsibility onto us.

Finally, these differences should also show why being small is not being ‘poor’ and ‘less developed’. Households and families that use few kilowatts instead of many, burn few litres of fuel instead of many, are very much more responsible and environmentally balanced than others. It is the small circles in this diagram that ought to be the inspiration.

Climate Measures that Matter by India Climate Portal / Rahul Goswami is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Deadly negligence

August 4, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

A resident looks at the debris of her damaged house after a landslide at Malin village, Pune district, in Maharashtra on 30 July 2014. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

Two months of monsoon that have delivered rainfall considerably below normal have given way to an end July and early August that has brought torrents of rain in some locations, and with it destruction and the loss of life.

In the last week, there has been a landslide in the Pune district, western Maharashtra, in which the death toll has risen to over 100. There has been a landslide in Nepal, along the Bhote Kosi river, around 120 kilometres from Kathmandu, which is reported to have killed over 100 and displaced thousands. The situation there has led to an emergency in north Bihar, through which the Kosi flows, with some 65,000 people being evacuated from nine districts.

In the Bay of Bengal, 40 trawlers are reported to have gone missing in bad weather; there are estimated to be some 650 fishermen on board the vessels. In the Munshiganj district of central Bangladesh, about 40 kilometres from Dhaka, a ferry on the Padma river sank with about 200 on board.

Every one of these events is repeated every monsoon – landslide, flood, river ferry sinking, fishing trawlers missing at sea – with little indication that learning takes place about how to contain the impacts and how to prepare for them when they become threats.

The threat from the Kosi developed after a massive landslide blocked the main course of Bhote Kosi river, a tributary of the Kosi, in Sindhupalchok district of Nepal. The landslide brought down rock which has dammed the river, immediately forming a large lake. Authorities in Nepal have been trying to release the water without endangering downstream regions.

The central government has said (o4 August Monday) that there is no immediate threat of a flood. India’s Home Ministry, the Nepal Water Commission, India’s Central Water Commission and India’s National Crisis Management Committee are coordinating preparations, relief and technical expertise. The Bihar state government is carrying our the evactuations to avoid a situation like 2008, when a breach in the Kosi embankment at Kushaha in Nepal caused one of the most devastating floods.

The landslide in Nepal and the emergency in downstream Bihar has again revived the debate as to whether a dam would help solve the problem of floods in north Bihar. Since 1945 there have been commissions to study the problem and make their recommendations, and proposed dams have been abandoned for compelling reasons – that the river valleys have unstable foundations, that the region is a high-risk seismic zone, that the reservoirs would silt up far sooner than expected, and that the costs would be prohibitive.

The tragic incidents in Maharashtra, in the Bay of Bengal, and in Munshiganj (Bangladesh) have much more to do with the wilful neglect of conditions that have built up a cumulative threat. The landslide in Pune district which has buried portions of a village, its residents and cattle, was according to a number of media reports the result of factors that included what appears to be no recognition of the most obvious risks. The hill above the village of Malin is reported to have been the site of wind turbines (which need heavy machinery to erect them) and also farming that used heavy equipment to level the top of the hill. Whichever factor is true, the use to which hill land was put was a threat to the settlement at its base, and little thought was given to monsoon conditions.

That such a large group of trawlers went missing in the Bay of Bengal near Kakdwip in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal has to do with economic reasons, which media reports will at this stage not uncover. Three of the trawlers are reported as having capsized and authorities in West Bengal are said to have ‘traced’ 25 of the vessels. The question is: when squally weather and forecasts of heavy rain trigger warning to fishermen, why do they ignore these warnings and risk their lives? The usual answer is loan economics, for the trawler owners can’t afford delays in servicing the loans with which they bought the vessels, and are under pressure to find and sell fish, which is when safety considerations are ignored.

Similar considerations lead in Bangladesh to riverine ferries – a common mode of transport in great deltas – being overloaded to far beyond their capacities. The monsoon brings with it weather conditions that demand safety first, but when economic desperation and plain greed set in, elementary precautions that are meant to save lives are discarded.