Floods predicted in India due to monsoons
Global warming will make India's summer monsoon rains more “chaotic”, experts warned. This could affect the water and food supply for millions of people, according to Earth System Dynamics.
Seasonal showers usually arrive in June and end in September. They account for four-fifths of India's annual rainfall. Roughly a fifth of the world's population needs these rains to replenish drinking water supplies and to farm.
A new study has shown that monsoons will become 5% more intense for every degree of Celsius in global temperature. This puts the local population at risk of floods and therefore crop failures. In addition, monsoons will become more unpredictable.
“We have found that the monsoon will become more chaotic and less predictable from year to year, because the differences between years will become stronger,” – explained study co-author Professor Anders Levermann.
To make the prediction, the scientists used 31 climate models and analyzed possible changes in the summer monsoon in India according to four future climate scenarios. In the best-case scenario, the world has curbed the warming and the temperature rise has been well below 2 degrees Celsius (compared to pre-industrial levels). At its worst, almost nothing was done.
It turned out that in the first case, seasonal precipitation in India will increase by about 10% by the end of the century. In the second, the growth will be almost 25%.
Scientists noted that now the intensity of the monsoons has rather decreased. This is likely due to the widespread air pollution that began in India in the 1950s. But monsoons are very sensitive to climate change, and this trend, new data has shown, could be reversed.
Earlier, experts said that even ending greenhouse gas emissions would not stop global warming. This is the conclusion reached by Norwegian scientists.
