Climate crisis makes South Asia heatwaves ?30 times more likely?

Study says heatwaves in India and Pakistan should be ‘extraordinarily rare’ but current level of global warming made them 30 times more likely.The devastating heatwave that has baked India and Pakistan in recent months was made more likely by climate change and is a glimpse of the region’s future, says a study by international scientists.The World Weather Attribution group analysed historical weather data that suggested early, long heatwaves that affect a massive geographical area are rare, once-a-century events.But the current level of global warming, created by human-caused climate change, has made those heatwaves 30 times more likely, said the group’s study released on Monday.If global heating increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial levels, then heatwaves like this could occur twice in a century and up to once every five years, said Arpita Mondal, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, who was part of the study.“This is a sign of things to come,” Mondal said.For example, “in a 2C warmer world, what is a one in 100-year event now can be as frequent as a one in five-year event,” Mondal told a news briefing.To conduct their analysis, the scientists compared temperature data readings for the months of March and April dating back several decades with what conditions might have been without climate change, based on computer simulations.“People in South Asia are used to some level of hot temperatures,” said Roop Singh, climate risk adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.