In India, Summer Heat May Soon Be Literally Unbearable
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've lived all my life in India. Though have moved around for jobs. Most of my life I have lived in Bangalore. I worked for around 3 years in the US.
While I was in the US, my Asthma kind of magically vanished. In fact I don't even remembering having any respiratory issues of any kind, until in the last 4 months when I caught an infection. When the doctor asked I had show him my unused, now expired Asthma medication. So the doctor suggested my Asthma remission could be due to lack of pollution in the US. In fact despite drinking water while traveling at various places in the US I rarely caught a infection of any kind. Not even a Stomach upset. The 3 years that I lived in US were my healthiest in all life. I didn't take a single pill for anything. In fact that final infection I had didn't warrant medication too.
The moment I came back to Bangalore, my Asthma returned, like on the very third day. Eating out in Bangalore, the throat infections and food poisoning returned. And Bangalore is considered a relatively well off place compared to many cities. But still you see streets littered with garbage, stagnant water. Malaria, Dengue and Chickungunya break outs every few months are very common. Even until recently Dengue was almost like a death sentence in Bangalore.
Every few months there is a lake in around vicinity of South Bangalore(called Bellandur lake) which catches fire. Apart from the industrial waste, a lot of apartments release sewage in the lake, eventually leading to decay, and then Methane release and then fire.
Though I don't have much Idea about North India, from news I learn every day that things are way worse. A couple of months back New Delhi skies blocked out sun for several weeks at a stretch due to Paddy burning.
India needs very urgent laws on the lines of Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act in US. Too many people are falling ill due to pollution and illness. Apart from the fact that illness is a bad thing, its also a huge drain on economy in terms of health care cost and work place productivity.
What do you mean by this?
Also general lack of respect for the law. Things like everyday corruption. And then lack of basic public hygiene, come to mind.
India had to do a lot of work to eradicate polio. It took quite literally decades.The next set of diseases which will be more like Diabetes, Thyroid related diseases, Malnutrition etc will be far harder to deal with.
In fact my dad(who was a bus/truck driver), tells me he had far better quality of life than me in the pre-1980s. Air was pure, and the city was empty, and it was safe in the cities. It was almost like there was enough space and resources for everybody. You could rent easily. Working hours were same, but people got home quickly(not much traffic) and spent time with families.
And more importantly there was a calm, relaxed pace to life.
These days we have money and career, but much is lost in terms of quality of life.
India 2018: 1.358 billion people
India 2038: 1.615 billion people
https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/2038/
India urgently needs population control, perhaps schemes funded partly by the West to issue vasectomies to young, poor men in exchange for $200.
Things have become particularly bad in the last 5 years. Come winters, the sky isn't visible in Delhi for weeks. At the height of the crop-burning season (why they do it, I have no idea), there was literally smoke inside my house.
India's biggest cities are practically unlivable. Public transport is abysmal, traffic is terrible, and the pollution keeps getting worse.
Nearly all the smart people I know who can afford to emigrate have already emigrated, or plan to.
India needs to control its pollution and traffic problems otherwise there will be yet another wave of brain drain and the beneficiaries will be countries like Canada and Australia
Well the bad news, Asthma like diseases are like the tip of the Ice Berg. The next set of life style diseases like Diabetes and Thyroid Malfunction are going to be worse. There is already a growing trend of Thyroid Malfunction among women in Bangalore.
>>At the height of the crop-burning season (why they do it, I have no idea),
The crop waste after they harvest is expensive to dispose off, and decays slow. All options getting rid of them are expensive or too slow. Plus they don't compost because fertilizers are cheap, apparently.
>>India's biggest cities are practically unlivable. Public transport is abysmal, traffic is terrible, and the pollution keeps getting worse.
I can assure you there is no respite. We are only in the beginning of what are huge urbanization trends. Talking to my relatives who stay around districts around Bangalore, I don't know a single young nephew/niece/cousin who doesn't want to come to Bangalore. Because Bangalore is where good tuition classes, jobs and other stuff is.
>>India needs to control its pollution and traffic problems otherwise there will be yet another wave of brain drain and the beneficiaries will be countries like Canada and Australia
More bad news here. Many countries are cracking down on immigration. Thanks to the blatant fraud and abuse our people do here. During a recent H1-B thread on HN someone mentioned India alone files 2.5 times more H1-B applications than all other countries combined and the phenomenon of 'Principal Engineers' who can't code a shell script.
With the growth of right wing politics and nationalists trends in the west, immigration is no longer an easy deal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loo_(wind)
The dry summer wind is considered fatal by many and normally people have raw mango juice or Aam panna to ward it off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_panna
I grew up in North India where my parents made me drink it after lunch every day during summers.
Nowadays I find that many people are not aware of this traditional recipe and they instead opt for stuff like drips etc as mentioned in the article.
Given that many replies seem to be about how out of touch I am about the temperature and mango juice aspect let me clarify the post, once and for all:
Yes,it is getting hotter year after year and there is enough proof for climate change. But, the article talks about an "Indian Summer" and then I don't see any mention of things like "Loo" and "Aam panna" which are generally associated with an Indian Summer I can't help but say it is not a good read or even properly researched. As you put it, we can change it to Pakistan or Bangladesh and have the same article. So, my issue is with the quality of the content. But maybe I didn't put it across well.
(That said, shouldn't more or less the same hold for any country at the same latitudes?)
Well our Prime Minister said, its not the climate but its we who are changing.
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/internet-cant-keep-calm-aft...
:)
Why worry about all this science, when you can eat Kulfi and chill.
What disappoints me in this regard is people who buy flats in those apartments knowing well that the complex is encroaching a lake(bed), eventually a demolition happens. But really how careless would you have to be, to buy there at the first place.
>>Four years back having an Air Conditioner at your home in Bangalore was very rare.
It is, Even now. In the insides of the city where there are more individual homes than apartments.
But, some times a few flat owners have no other options at all. I hear, the flats along the Electronic city road, receive crazy levels of dust every day. Same with those near Hebbal.
Also even in cases where lakes haven't been approached, due absence of civic planning, they obvious can't pipe sewage into the normal sewage pipes. Given those pipes were built for individual homes, not massive apartment townships. What they do now is send sewage to lakes. Case in point Bellandur lake and Ulsoor lake in Bangalore. By definition these are not lakes, but cesspools.
I can't see the heat becoming any more unbearable than it is!
I lived in SE Asia for many years, it is also very hot there, we were right on the equator. But the AC was very cold in every place, and the cities were often designed to allow moving about the town without ever going outside (lots of underground tunnels with AC, for example).
While summer is humid and hot in Japan I can't recall ever being this hot.
Temperatures around 30C and locally over 33-35C may sound mild, depending on where you're from, but this is a country where summer temperatures usually hover around 20-25C. We're simply not used to it, and our houses are built to keep in the warmth, not get rid of it.
Not sure whether trees enough can change everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
I had several Vietnamese people ask me how I wasn't feeling cold, several of them were wearing jerseys to stay warm. I told them there where I'm from, it gets down to -6 in winter, 25 degrees is warm to me.
It's really the humidity in Asia that gets me though. It got up to 40 C in my (new) city this summer and I didn't really struggle at all, because it was dry heat.
> You can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. When the wet bulb temperature reaches the human body's natural 37 degrees Celsius, it'll be impossible for the body to expel heat via sweating (evaporative cooling). At that point no amount of adaptation will help, and humans need technology to stay alive.
You can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. When the wet bulb temperature reaches the human body's natural 37 degrees Celsius, it'll be impossible for the body to expel heat via sweating (evaporative cooling). At that point no amount of adaptation will help, and humans need technology to stay alive.
There was plenty of medical waste in those landfills that burned with the particles up in the air.
You might want to be careful in Mumbai, its not exactly Shangri La.