India under its longest-ever heatwave, with worse to come
India under its longest-ever heatwave, with worse to come
The government’s top weather expert warned that people will face increasingly oppressive temperatures. Read more at straitstimes.com.
If there's a silver lining to this, is that the people of one of the most populous countries in Earth are going to become far more likely to support policies against climate change.
I wouldn't bet on it. They have just re-elected Modi, whose record is pretty sketchy.
Modi's party lost its majority to a bunch of smaller parties, forcing him into a coalition government. The Bharatiya Janata Party is sixty seats off its 303 seat peak in 2019, in a year when Modi himself predicted a 370 seat landslide in his favor.
That said, the coalition is still largely composed of business-focused neoliberals and religious fascists. I suspect we're more likely to see Modi pivot to direct military conflict with his Muslim neighbors in an effort to shore up his nationalist base. Also isn't helpful that Indian social media is awash in "China rigged our elections!" conspiracy theories, as tensions of the border escalate again. It doesn't look like they'll be overly invested in climate change mitigation when they're building up their military and cranking up their fuel consumption.
Most of their population is living hand to mouth.
I don't think they care slightest about climate change.
There is no consensus on the actual size of India’s middle class. Using the classification of those spending between US$2–10 per capita per day, over 600 million people — half of India’s population — were in the middle class in 2012, up from less than 300 million or 27 per cent of the population in 2000. Nearly 75 per cent of the middle class is comprised of the lower middle class — those spending US$2–4 per capita per day, a figure that’s only slightly above the global poverty line.
If using a higher income band — where a person is considered middle class if their daily income is approximately US$17–100 — 432 million Indians can be included in the middle class as of 2021, comprising 31 per cent of the population, up from 14 per cent in 2005.
These are people who are able to care about more than subsistence. Not "middle class" in a western sense, but secure enough in their own community to be able to push their politicians to do something about them not dying of heatwaves.
I'm pretty sure people will care when it's literally killing them.
"The latest heatwave has seen temperatures in New Delhi match the capital’s previous record high: 49.2 deg C clocked in 2022."
120°F! Fuck me! That's like walking around in a latte!
It's close to the sous vide temperature for a medium rare steak.
Sous vided Indians 😋
Or vegas in august...
Now, I do believe in climate change. I just believe that the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do. The earth used to be 150F in the area currently known as Alaska in the time of the dinosaurs. Then we had 2 ice ages. The area currently known as Florida was at one time -200F.
And a lot of that ice still stuck around. It's melting, as thats what ice does. We may have sped up the ice melting, and the ice may have been what was keeping the planet artificially cold, but I think earths natural tempature was ALWAYS hotter than anything humans experienced.
I think even without humans melting the ice caps, the ice caps would have still melted. It would have just taken longer.
But, if I'm wrong, than India, the most densely populated country on the planet by far, reaching record high tempatures would be pretty good proof that humans ARE behind climate change.
Stfu with your nonsense.
Earth warms up and cools down naturally that's a known fact. But over thousands of years, not 200. What we're witnessing right now is not natural and we have the data to support it.
Millions even, we haven't been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We've reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!
The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:
https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we'll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it's been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.
Furthermore: we shouldn't care too much about the speed at which Earth heats or cools down on its own. If we know we're a significant factor alongside its natural processes, we should still contribute to the NET temperature being one that's appropriate for human life. If the Earth was heating up this fast naturally, we should still try to cool it down by artificial means, if possible.
It would have just taken longer.
You could say that. The earth in general changes temperature one degrees in a few millennium if it's in a hurry. Humanity is causing changes of a degree in a decade. It's unnaturally fast.
I think that math is way off. We didn't have all these polluting machines in the 1800s, yet the 1800s were warmer than the 1700s. We didn't start using cars until the early 1900s. Same with planes, and it wouldn't be until the 1930s that we got jet engines that pollute in the way you think of today.
This user has 600 comments in their one month since joining. That's 20 comments per day. Maybe they should try to spend less time commenting falsehoods, and more time reading?
"Lemmy needs to grow!"
"Hey everybody, check out this loser who actually is active, and posts more activity in a day, than I do in a month.......he should go away, so lemmy can remain small and unheard of!"
Seriously? THATS your attack??? If anything 20 messages per day sounds really low. These messages take like 20 seconds to write, and boost activity and engagement on an almost completely dead platform.
But then I see posts elsewhere on Lemmy "what have you done to boost niche communities?"
Uhhhhh.......have you guys tried POSTING AND COMMENTING???
I know its a crazy idea, but it just might work! I look forward to seeing your reply......in like 4 days after I've long forgotten about any of this.
What is this, mumble rap for science deniers? Just riffing this bullshit on the fly.
Florida was -200F.
Exactly, the closer you get to the equator, the colder it gets.
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Yeaaah...
I'm gonna go ahead and say you should keep your thoughts to yourself.
Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that's because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We're now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.
If fossil fuels hadn't come along, it's possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we've gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don't want to see an "age of the dinosaurs" climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.
the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do
Over a long enough timeline, the high temperatures will force a sharp decline in human population and economic activity. But this isn't earth dictating its own temperature any more than a guy with a gun to his head is an example of a bullet dictating its own velocity.
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