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Mint
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Mint
Counting the carbon footprint of Israel's war on Gaza as Asia's climate crisis becomes more severe
Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox. Dear reader, War is in the air, and all the uncertainties and tragedies that come with it. In times like these, when bombing raids dominate the daily news cycle, it can become difficult to recognize that other problems—like climate change—exist, and that rising global temperature doesn't discriminate between who is bombing and who is getting bombed. The end outcome is the same for everyone, and equally grim. War and the climate crisis are not unrelated subjects. In fact, they are deeply intertwined, because ultimately, every explosion, every missile fired, every building and life destroyed, follows the basic laws of physics, like the transference of energy (a building explodes into smoke), moving in a straight line towards entropy, or the ultimate end of matter. Take Israel's relentless bombing of Gaza since October 2023—a continuous exercise in pulverization that has levelled all of Gaza Strip and killed over 55,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. A studypublished on 30 May, calculated that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the conflict in the first 15 months (October 2023-January 2025) were nearly 1.89m tCOe (million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents). Also Read | The world has already breached a dangerous level of warming, and India isn't prepared The report, aptly titled War On Climate, states that this is more than the annual emissions of 36 individual countries and territories. If one were to factor in the military preparations going into the conflict, and add the material costs of rebuilding Gaza, the emissions shoot up to over 32.2m tCO2e, overtaking the annual emissions of 102 countries. The authors note that the emissions of militaries are grossly underreported, and that their calculations 'point to the urgent need for increased visibility and mandatory reporting of military emissions for both war and peacetime". State of the climate Asia is heating up faster than the global average The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report on Monday, the State Of The Climate in Asia 2024. Among other findings, the report states that Asia is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. In fact, the warming trend in 1991-2025 has been nearly double that of the period of 1961-1990. Some of the other highlights from the report are the fact that Asia's major mountain ranges, especially the Tien Shan and central Himalaya, are losing glaciers at an alarming rate, with 23 out of 24 major glaciers steadily losing mass between 2023 and 2024. Intense marine heatwaves are also becoming increasingly common in the Indian Ocean, and land heat records are going through the roof. Also Read | Remembering Pope Francis's climate advocacy, Bill Aitken's nature writing, and the race to avoid runaway climate change The report highlights several cases of extreme weather events in India, including the Kerala landslide during the monsoon last year, where over 350 people died after Wayanad experienced 500mm of rainfall in just 48 hours. The report also highlights India's intense heatwaves, as well as 1,300 people losing their lives due to lightning strikes, and intense cyclones like Remal making landfall. In 2024, Asia's average temperature was 1 degree Celsius higher than the 1991-2020 average. The news in brief -In a previous newsletter, I had written about Indian policy think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water's (CEEW) new research on how India is suffering from extreme heat. In this article, my Mint colleague Manjul Paul takes a closer look at the report. - Donald Trump may be the most anti-climate president in recent US history, but 70% of Americans support the need for global climate policy to tackle the climate crisis. -The world's indigenous people are on the frontlines of the devastating impacts of climate change. This haunting photo-essay takes a look at how rising temperatures are upending the lives of Peru's Andean communities. Climate change tracker Two years left to act It is becoming increasingly clear that the impacts of climate change are way worse than previously reported. We had pointed out in an earlier edition of this newsletter how the world is closer than ever to permanently breaching the 'safe' warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030. An important new study published in early June has now presented us with more granular updates on how global indicators of the climate crisis have changed over the past year. The study titled, Indicators Of Global Climate Change 2024, is the work of a international consortium of climate scientists. It's headline findings include the fact that the world has heated up by 1.36 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and that the current rate of warming is an alarming 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. This means that if global GHG emissions aren't drastically reduced, we will shoot towards a catastrophic 2 degrees of warming much earlier than 2100. This also means that the hopes of keeping long-term warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius now hang by a thread. To achieve this goal, the world can burn 80 billion tonnes of fossil fuels for just under 2 years and no more. For context, in 2024, the world burned approximately 37 billion tonnes of fossil fuels. Since this is not going to happen, the study urges that we look at goals that are still achievable, like limiting warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius. For that, the world's carbon budget stretches to just over 9 years, at 390 billion tonnes. Right now, we are looking at a catastrophic warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century. Know your jargon Cloudburst Over the past few years, we have become accustomed to news of cloudbursts in different parts of the country during the monsoon. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) defines this as a rain event that sees 'an extreme amount of precipitation in a short period of time, sometimes accompanied by hail and thunder, which is capable of creating flood situations". India experienced such heavy dumping of rain last monsoon, like the Kerala landslides mentioned above, or when Delhi was hit by a cloudburst-like situation on 31 July. That day, over 100mm of rain fell across 24 hours, leading to widespread flooding, and the IMD declared a red alert over the city. On 25 May this year, Himachal Pradesh experienced devastating flash floods when over 100mm of rain fell in various parts of the state in 24 hours, causing landslides and massive property damage. We may yet experience such violent rainfall events this monsoon. Also Read | India's climate crisis: Early heatwaves, Himalayan glaciers melting and a biodiversity collapse A 2020 climate report published by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), noted that as India gets hotter, cloudburst events are also increasing, with the west coast seeing a rise in short-span high intensity rain events (an increase of 5 such incidents per decade) between 1969 and 2015. The horrific deluge in the Western Ghats between 19-25 July in 2021 is testament to the havoc such rain can cause. Speaking to Mint in the aftermath of the cloudburst, then MoES secretary Madhavan Rajeevan said, 'Now the number of rainy days (in a season) is decreasing. And the length of the dry spells is increasing. There's not much change in the total amount of rain. The number of rainy days may be small, but when it rains, it will rain very heavily, so that the seasonal total will be same." Prime Number 120 A recent study published in the journal Nature, titled Impacts Of Climate Change On Global Agriculture Accounting For Adaptation, states that for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, global food production will decrease by an average of 120 calories per person per day. For the study, researchers conducted a wide survey of 12,658 regions across 54 countries to understand if adapting to a warming climate can offset losses to food production. They found that under the current heating scenario, staples like wheat will see reduced yields of 7.7%, soy by 16% and corn by 8.3%. If our daily meals are to be divided into breakfast, lunch and dinner, this would be akin to the world giving up breakfast. If the world were to heat up by more than 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, then crop losses will be much more severe. 'In a high-warming future, we're still seeing caloric productivity losses in the order of 25% at global scale," the study's lead author Andrew Hultgren, an environmental economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told The Guardian. Book of the month This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein It may be common knowledge now, but author and activist Naomi Klein's 2014 book was the first to lay bare in forensic detail the intimate relationship between the capitalist mode of production, fossil fuels and the climate crisis. Published a year before the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, nearly everything that Klein talks about still holds true, be it the organized way in which climate denialism works or the dangerous techno-fantasies of geoengineering. Ironically, this goes to show that in the eleven years sinceThis Changes Everything was published, nothing really has changed. However, it remains a powerful book and a great introduction to the climate crisis. So that's it for this edition of Climate Change & You, dear reader. Sayantan will be back in a fortnight with the next instalment. Also Read This rice is set to make your meal climate-friendly
USA Today
2 days ago
- Science
- USA Today
Record heat, a climate reckoning: How will humans respond?
On a special episode (first released on June 25, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As the earth continues to warm, how will mankind respond? Is it in our nature to act? Author and climate scientist Kate Marvel joins USA TODAY's The Excerpt to discuss her new book 'Human Nature,' which explores how emotions may be key to our survival. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@ Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Climate change, global warming, we've all heard this steady drumbeat of doom. But a recent five-year forecast by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office puts it starkly. The world will likely soon break another annual temperature record, and according to The Associated Press, the heat will be deadly. What would happen if we embrace the idea that the future still rests firmly in our hands? Is it in our nature to learn, adapt, and change? And equally important, is there still time? Author and climate scientist Kate Marvel dives into those questions in her new book, Human Nature, on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me, Kate. Kate Marvel: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Dana Taylor: In your work, you manipulate climate models to gauge the impacts of climate change. In the simplest terms, can you briefly walk us through the creation of one of these models and how you've used them to glean data? Kate Marvel: So a climate model is basically a toy planet on a computer that we can do experiments on that would be impossible or unethical to do in the real world. We can't gauge human influence on the climate by asking everybody to go live on another planet for a couple of hundred years, but we can do that in the safe digital confines of a climate model. Now, what a climate model is is basically the encapsulation of everything we know about the physics and chemistry of how the world works, written down in equations and then translated to code. Dana Taylor: The most startling moments I experienced while reading your book are when you were expressing your anger regarding gaslighting by climate change deniers. Was there a specific tipping point for you here? And how did you grapple with how you would express anger in your writing? Kate Marvel: Yeah. I mean, I struggled a lot with expressing anger. I actually struggled a lot with expressing any emotions. Because scientists, we're supposed to be neutral, we're supposed to be objective, we're supposed to have no feelings whatsoever. And I was worried that if I expressed anger or if I expressed fear or grief or even hope, I would be taken less seriously as a scientist or maybe my science would be seen as a little bit less credible. But then I realized that we don't make ourselves more credible when we lie about not having feelings. I am a scientist, but I'm also a human being and I'm a human being who lives on this planet. And that means I feel things when I study the planet that I live on and that everybody I love lives on. So yeah, rage. I do feel incredible anger when I think about the history of climate science. None of this stuff is new. We've known about the greenhouse effect for more than 100 years and the history of climate science, scientists finding things out, is intertwined with the history of people pushing back on this and lying about it. So you can't really look at the history of climate science without looking at the counterbalancing history of climate denial. And I'm really mad about that. Dana Taylor: In your book you wrote that, "Weather is what we humans experience over our short lives and that climate is a matter for the Gods." What did you mean by that? And are you worried that some readers will walk away thinking there really isn't much that humans can do at this point? Kate Marvel: I wrote that because I wanted to include it in the context of, I talk about climate models in the context of Greek mythology, especially the myth of Cassandra, who famously was cursed to be able to see the future, but nobody would believe her. And so oftentimes climate scientists are called Cassandra's because we're making these projections about dire futures, but it seems like nobody's listening to us. So that was the context of things that I was playing with a little bit where I really wanted to bring that in. I think my colleague Dr. Marshall Shepherd at the University of Georgia puts it excellently that weather is your mood and climate is your personality. So climate is essentially the background conditions under which all weather can occur. It's not supposed to change this fast, but human beings, because we have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere, are indeed changing the climate. But when I look at it, I think, wow, wouldn't it be scarier if we didn't understand what was causing climate change? Wouldn't it be scarier if this were some meteor heading toward us that we didn't know how to stop? But the fact that we understand exactly what is causing climate change, it's humans doing things that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that means we know exactly how to stop it. So I think it's really important for scientists to stress that there are things that we can do. We are not doomed to inevitable, catastrophic climate change. We can still avoid the worst impacts. Dana Taylor: I want to stick with that in talking about the weather. You also said that all weather is formed in a changing climate. Can you help us understand the weather through the eyes of a climate scientist? Kate Marvel: There is no weather now that's not happening against the backdrop, like you pointed out, of this changed climate. So I cannot tell you what the weather is going to be like in New York City where I live 10 years from now on June 1st. But what I can tell you is that it's likely to be warm. I can tell you some of the basic contours of what it's likely to be because I know that New York City is on the East Coast of a large landmass. I know what the prevailing winds look like. I know the factors that shape the climate of New York City. Dana Taylor: Clearly humans, Homo sapiens, have adapted to life on this planet for roughly 300,000 years. Is it correct to say that based on your climate models, mankind will not be able to adapt quickly enough? Kate Marvel: I don't know because people are very, very, very difficult to put in a climate model. I am a physicist, I know exactly what water droplets and air molecules are going to do because those things obey the laws of physics. You push them, they always move in exactly the same way. Human beings are much more difficult to predict. So what human beings are going to do in response to the changing climate, are we going to take sensible science-based decisions and mitigate the change climate and adapt to the changes that have already occurred? That's a possibility. But are we going to panic and blame each other and have scapegoats? That's also a possibility. So I have learned as a physicist to actually be very, very humble about what I don't know. And the thing that I really don't know is what human beings are going to do. Dana Taylor: Well, the warning in your book that climate change is unlikely to dole out one disaster at a time is something that really struck me. I want you to help us understand what you call the misery index. Have humans survived worse than what we're experiencing now or worse than what your models predict we will experience in the near future? Kate Marvel: So one of the scariest things about climate change is that obviously it increases the risk of heat waves. But at the same time, it changes the humidity of the atmosphere. And I think we've all experienced it, that dry heat is very different from humid heat. A lot of people say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." And there is actually a threshold, what we call the wet bulb temperature, which is basically a measure of the combined heat and humidity. There's a point where that exceeds a value so that the human body cannot cool itself off by its natural response, which is sweating. And when the wet bulb temperature, that index, exceeds this particular critical threshold, if you go outside, even if you're young, even if you're healthy, even if you're not moving around very much, you will die. Now, that's not happening with any regularity right now, but we have seen in a couple isolated cases that threshold being exceeded. And for me, that's something that's very frightening because that is a little glimpse of possibly a world, particularly in the tropics, particularly in the Global South, where human beings are essentially no longer welcome. Dana Taylor: What would a reverse Ice Age look like? And are we at risk? Kate Marvel: Let's think about what the Ice Age was. Ice Ages are caused by little tiny wobbles in the Earth's orbit as it goes around the sun. The last Ice Age was around 21,000 years ago, scientists call it the last glacial maximum. And during the last glacial maximum, the temperature was between five and six degrees Celsius colder than it was now. And just to put that in perspective, what we could be looking at under an absolute worst case scenario is warming of about five to six degrees Celsius by the end of the century. So when you think about it, when you think about the difference between now and the last Ice Age, the planet looks very, very, very different back then. Human beings are surviving, there are species that are surviving, but it is a completely foreign planet to us. And when you look forward into the future, if it does warm by five degrees, six degrees Celsius, that is a planet that is also completely alien to us, completely foreign to us. And that could be the planet that we're sending our children to go live on. Dana Taylor: You wrote that you grew up wanting to make bad movies. Do you feel like a scientist in a bad movie? And what can that scientist do to save the day? Kate Marvel: I often feel like a scientist in a bad movie. And what makes a movie a disaster movie is usually when the scientist gets ignored. So I think it is very important that we not be ignored. The problem that I have with bad movies and good movies too, is that they tell the story of a single person. Movies usually have a hero. And that is not what's going to happen with climate change. There is no single hero. There's no one person who's going to come along and save all of us. We are all going to have to work together. We are all going to have to do this ourselves. And for me, that's almost comforting. It means that I don't have to be the star, I don't have to carry this picture on my shoulders because I am not capable of doing that. But it's knowing that I am in this with essentially all of humanity. And as a result, there are so many heroes of this story. There's so many people working on various aspects of this enormous problem to do something that humanity has never done before. And for me, that's what happens in a good story, is people do something that they didn't think they could do. Dana Taylor: Finally, you lean into human emotions like fear, guilt, and wonder. What do you hope readers might better understand about human civilization and climate change after reading your book? Kate Marvel: I hope they see themselves somewhere in the book. I hope they understand that climate change is important, not because it's affecting a planet necessarily, but because it's affecting our planet. I get really annoyed when I see these headlines that say, "Scientists concerned about climate change, or "Scientists worried about melting glaciers." Because I think, honestly, where do the rest of you live? What planet is everybody else on? And I want to make it very clear that scientists care about this because we're human beings and all human beings should care about this. This is not a scientific problem, it's not something that only scientists should be worried about, and it's certainly not something that all scientists can solve. And so I think that if we want to address the magnitude of this problem, one of the best ways to get started is to talk about it, to talk about it to ourselves, to talk about it with each other. And what I really hope is that people read this book and come away thinking, hey, I see myself in this picture. That to me will make it a success. Dana Taylor: Human Nature is available on bookshelves now. Thanks so much for being on The Excerpt, Kate. Kate Marvel: Oh, thank you so much. It was lovely. Dana Taylor: Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
South China Morning Post
2 days ago
- Climate
- South China Morning Post
How to prevent heatstroke in dogs and other pets in summer, plus symptoms and treatment
Humans are not the only ones who experience heatstroke: our four-legged friends can suffer from it too. And with summers getting more intense around the world, they are at more risk than ever. The data speaks for itself, with the World Meteorological Organization confirming that 2024 was the warmest year on record. Hong Kong, too, sweltered through scorching temperatures in 2024, logging its hottest year since records began in 1884 – and this year is shaping up to be another summer of hot weather warnings For veterinarians in the city, summers of soaring heat, combined with high levels of humidity and pollution, means that treating dogs for heat-related illnesses has become a frustrating cycle. 'Every summer, we see dogs in Hong Kong die from preventable heatstroke,' says Lloyd Kenda of Hong Kong's Valley Veterinary Centre. 'Unfortunately, this is a topic that needs to be repeated regularly.'
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Science
- Business Standard
Asian climate red alert: Moving to net zero will best serve its poorest
The exceptionally high temperatures on Asia's landmass last year had its knock-on effect on 15 million sq km of ocean area, one-tenth of the earth's ocean surface Business Standard Editorial Comment Mumbai Listen to This Article The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has sounded a red alert in its latest 'State of the Climate in Asia' report, indicating that the continent is warming twice as fast as the global land and ocean average. According to the report, the 'mean anomaly' for 2024 in Asia was 1.04 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2000 average. In 2024, average temperatures ranked as the warmest or second-warmest on record, depending on the dataset used (the WMO uses six datasets in its analysis). From east to west, these findings would not come as a surprise to a range of Asians who suffered extreme
The Sun
3 days ago
- Climate
- The Sun
Heavy rain leaves southwest China under water; more storms on horizon
BEIJING: Vulnerable communities were told to seek refuge on higher ground as multiple rivers burst their banks after days of rain in China's flood-hit province of Guizhou, the southwestern end of a seasonal rain belt that stretches all the way to Japan. At least two riverside cities - Congjiang and Rongjiang - each with a population of over 300,000, on Tuesday told residents on the banks of fast-rising rivers and in low-lying areas to flee. The mountainous province of Guizhou and other parts of southern China have been battered by heavy rains since last week as the annual East Asia monsoon kicked into high gear, breaking rainfall records in parts of China. While China is no stranger to summer floods, some scientists warn that climate change is ushering in heavier and more frequent rain. Massive flooding could trigger unforeseen 'black swan' events with extreme consequences such as dam collapses, government officials say. On a highway to Rongjiang on Tuesday, a viaduct collapsed after a landslide toppled concrete columns and sent one section of the road crashing down the hillside, local media reported. A cargo truck that had stopped in time as the section ahead of it fell away was perched perilously over the edge while its driver waited to be rescued, a video shared on social media showed. In other parts of Guizhou, many highway sections were blocked by landslides or were hit by cave-ins. In cities such as Rongjiang, flooded streets paralysed local traffic and low-lying areas including underground garages and shopping mall basements were under water. More rain is expected over the next few days, state meteorologists forecast, warning that provinces, including Guizhou, hit by overlapping storms should be especially on their guard. In contrast, provinces north of the seasonal rain belt such as Henan, Shandong and Hebei, as well as the capital Beijing, sweltered in temperatures just shy of 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday. In an annual report on Monday, the World Meteorological Organization under the United Nations cautioned that Asia was warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, fuelling more extreme weather and exacting a heavy toll on the region.
