“New Delhi1 feels like it is on fire. The heat comes off the road in blistering waves, and the water that flows from the cold tap is too hot to touch.”2
A scorching heat wave is enveloping India and Pakistan. It is bringing temperatures for one in five people on the planet dangerously close to the limit for human survivability!
For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heat wave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 122˚F (50˚C), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages of water and power.3
People who regularly sleep in the streets in Pakistan and India are now facing death from record high outdoor temperatures. Photo: AP
In slums surrounding India's large cities, people are dying on the oven-like pavements where poverty forces them to sleep. Power shortages caused by surging demand for electricity for air-conditioning have led to eight-hour blackouts in parts of India. Education has been impacted—from school windows melting, to shortages of fans, to harmful smoke brought in from the outside when fans are in use. Schools in some states of India have shut down because of the record heat.
The majority of deaths from this heat wave are not being reported—India has also notoriously undercounted COVID deaths. And needed relief is not being given at the levels called for.
A “state of the science” briefing published by World Weather Attribution concluded that climate change has made heat waves in the world both more intense and more likely. As a result of global warming driven by fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) that are at the foundation of the world capitalist energy system... what were once called “generational disasters” or “500-year storms” have become once-in-a-decade events.
In other words, this heat wave is not an “unfortunate” one-time drastic occurrence but a preview of things to come—as global warming renders vast stretches of the planet uninhabitable. In the world today, nearly 23 million people, overwhelmingly from poor Third World countries, have become “climate refugees,” displaced by extreme weather events that are becoming more common and destructive because of global warming.4 To understand more about climate change and heat waves, see the accompanying box, “The Science of Heat Waves.”
Woman worker at coal depot. India's economy and competitiveness in the imperialist world economy depend on cheaply produced coal. This intensifies global warming and air pollution. Photo: AP
“If We Do Not Work and Live Here, Then Where Will We Go?”
The majority of India's population works outdoors—in agriculture, construction, services, and more. And now many must work in temperatures of 110˚F (43˚C) and above. Most cannot afford air conditioning or refrigeration. According to a recent United Nations-sponsored study, almost 323 million people across the country are at high risk from extreme heat (exhaustion, sickness, heatstroke) but don't have access to fans and refrigerators. Just 12 percent of India’s 1.4 billion citizens have access to air conditioning, which means hundreds of millions of people are simply unable to cool themselves when their bodies reach the point of heatstroke. And “there are no laws in India that prevent outdoor activity when temperatures reach a certain level. Most of these deaths occur in men aged 30-45. These are working-class, blue-collar men who have no option but to be working in the scorching heat.”5
The poorest of the poor are suffering terribly. Here is Sunita’s story, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
Sunita lives and works on a rubbish dump in Delhi’s north that has been on fire for more than a week, spitting out toxic smoke while letting off a stench of burning plastic and rotting food. She must carry on her work as a rubbish picker, packing up recyclable bottles from the smoldering landfill in the midst of the record-breaking temperatures. “Our kids are very young. All of them are coughing and have pain in their heads. We are living here because we are forced to. If we do not work and live here then where will we go?”
Cascading Ecological Effects
Watch This Video to See How More of the Planet is Becoming Uninhabitable Because of Rising Temperatures
South Asia’s heat wave is unusual because it is happening much earlier in the season than normal, before summer weather typically sets in. It is also spread out over a much larger area, covering most of the landmass across Pakistan and India instead of being concentrated in a few pockets. According to researchers, lower rainfall was one of the key factors in the heat wave.6 “We had clear weather which caused a lack of rain in March and April,” reported a climate scientist at Climate Analytics, based in Islamabad, Pakistan. “The rain was substantially lower than the normal, about 75 percent below normal.”
The relentless heat, with temperatures soaring beyond 100˚F (38˚C) for days, particularly in northwestern India and southeastern Pakistan, has not only led to deaths but also to flooding from the melting of glaciers in the Himalaya mountains. In India's western Gujarat state, currently averaging temperatures over 110˚F (43˚C), high-flying birds, including pigeons and kites, have been dropping out of the sky every day, the news agency Reuters reported.
The extreme heat poses a major problem for agriculture, a primary source of income for hundreds of millions of people across the subcontinent. India's mango crop has suffered with poor yields and quality, and damage from heat in transport and storage. Mango is India's “king of fruits,” a livelihood for many of India's small farmers and a major export. It is used for cooking and is cherished for its flavorful taste and sweet juice. Now sellers are tossing out quickly-rotting mangos due to the heat.
The heat wave has stunted India’s wheat crop, helping to fuel an emerging global food crisis.7 The Indian government has gone as far as to ban its wheat exports to the rest of the world.8 The ban, coupled with the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on wheat exports from both Russia and Ukraine, has international agencies concerned about the potential of a global food shortage. Agricultural goods produced in the oppressed countries of the global South are transported worldwide in huge container ships consuming massive amounts of fuel oil, which contributes to pollution and global warming.
The Problem IS Capitalism-Imperialism
The global system of capitalism-imperialism, in its anarchic pursuit of profit and competitive advantage, has ravaged the environment. This is a system in which fossil fuels that cause global warming are not only economically “cost-effective,” but also central to the system's overall functioning and military power. The workings of the capitalist market cannot and will not put an end to using these fossil fuels because blocs of capital are forced to ruthlessly compete with each other for maximum returns and strategic advantage, compelling them to use the cheapest and most widely available sources of energy and to “make good” on their investments in fossil fuels.9 And now we see how the war in Ukraine and U.S. rivalry with imperialist Russia are leading to the ramping up of oil production.
In the decades that followed the end of World War 2 in 1945, imperialist-dominated financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund made loans to and prodded governments in Third World countries to invest in transport and power systems, in fossil fuels, and mining/minerals extraction—to benefit imperialism and its transnational corporations and supply chains.
And carbon emissions by Third World countries have exacerbated global climate change. HOWEVER, even these contributions pale in comparison to those of the imperialist powers. The United States and Western Europe alone are responsible for almost half of the carbon accumulated in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, and it is a cruel irony: the poorest half of the world’s population—roughly 3.5 billion people—account for just 10 percent of “total global emissions attributed to individual consumption.” Yet these poor “live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change.”10
Supplies arrive on containership in NY-NJ harbor. While the U.S. has 5% of the world's population, it consumes 24% of the world's energy. Photo: revcom.us
It is this capitalist-imperialist system that has brought us to this climate brink, where vast sections of the planet become uninhabitable… and it is this system that is the main obstacle to addressing this crisis with the urgency and on the scale required. We are facing a crisis of unprecedented and existential dimensions—threatening the ecosystems of the planet and life itself.
To truly respond to this crisis, we need a revolution to overthrow this system... to create a new state power and socialize ownership of the means of production and forge a planned socialist economy—the radically different economic foundation—that makes it possible to rapidly restructure economies away from fossil fuels, to utilize society’s resources collectively, and unleash people to go to work on the environmental emergency in the interests of world humanity and protecting the planet. For more on how a revolutionary socialist society would address this environmental catastrophe, see the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, Some Key Principles of Socialist Sustainable Development, and What Could the New Socialist Society Do Differently? And Would! —A Simple Example.
In the U.S., this is a rare time when revolution becomes more possible—and this possibility must not be squandered.
Early Season Heat Waves Strike India. The map shows air temperatures on April 27, 2022. It was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, and represents air temperatures at 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) above the ground.
Date 29 April 2022
GOES
The Science of Heat Waves
A heat wave begins when a high atmospheric pressure system settles over an area. The high-pressure system compresses and heats up the air while squeezing out clouds. Without clouds above, sunlight hits the land below directly, stripping away moisture that would otherwise help cool the air. As the pressure builds up, the sun bakes the ground more, and over the course of days, heat accumulates.1
Wet-bulb temperature measures the combination of heat and humidity, which can hamper the human body's ability to cool itself down if at too high a level. A wet-bulb temperature of 95˚F (35˚C) is regarded as the theoretical limit of what humans can endure.2 Beyond this point it becomes impossible for sweat to cool the body down, causing people to overheat and in effect, cook. Cells swell, proteins are deformed and organ systems fail, resulting in death. At wet-bulb temperatures above 95˚F, it is thought that even young healthy people wearing light clothing—regardless of whether they are parked in front of a fan, in the shade, or have unlimited water to drink—will die in about six hours.
Two heat waves in India and Pakistan in the summer of 2015, with brief wet-bulb highs of 86˚F (30˚C), killed around 4,000 people.3 The heat dome in America’s Pacific Northwest in 2021 killed around 200 people at a wet-bulb of about 77˚F (25˚C). According to a recent study, Jacobabad (in Pakistan) "is one of two cities on Earth where wet-bulb temperatures have reached the limit for human survivability, and has done so on four separate occasions."
This time around, even though temperatures in India and Pakistan reached 118˚F (48˚C), humidity thankfully remained fairly low. But even so, in parts of India, humidity was still high enough that if the day’s peak moisture had coincided with its peak heat, hundreds more would have died.4 This heat wave is officially estimated to have caused at least 90 deaths across India and Pakistan,5 but this number might actually be 10 times higher due to underreporting (and lying) by the Indian government.6 The human suffering and the environmental impacts of this heat wave are immense, far beyond even these projections.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. Irfan, U. (2022, May 11). India and Pakistan’s severe heat wave, explained. Vox. [back]
2. It would be reached at an actual temperature of 113˚F (45°C) if relative humidity were 50%, or at about 102˚F (39°C) if humidity were 75%. [back]
3. Economist. (2022, May 13). The increasing frequency of fatal wet-bulb temperatures. [back]
4. Wallace-Wells, D. (2022, May 18). Opinion | Climate Change Has Made Deadly Heat Waves Normal. The New York Times. [back]
5. Dickie, G. (2022, May 24). Climate change boosted odds of recent deadly heat in India, Pakistan, scientists say. Reuters. [back]
6. According to Dr Dileep Mavalankar, Director at the Indian Institute of Public Health, the Indian government reports only “about 10% of the actual heat-related deaths as due to heat stroke, while about 90% are not visibly reported.” [back]