India Records Its Hottest Day Ever As Temperature Hits 51C (123.8F) (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A city in northern India has shattered the national heat record, registering a searing 51C -- the highest since records began -- amid a nationwide heatwave. The new record was set in Phalodi, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, and is the equivalent of 123.8F. It tops a previous record of 50.6C set in 1956."Yesterday (Thursday) was the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country... 51C in Phalodi," said BP Yadav, a director of India's meteorological department, on Friday.

Comments

Refugees

[Sir_Eptishous]

If this trend continues, and it looks like it will, we will see "environmental refugees" increase. It will become more difficult to support life in certain parts of this planet, places that have had human civilization for quite a long time.

Sure, technology could alleviate many of the problems of living in a place with extreme heat, but that requires money and political will.

We have already seen the warnings about areas of the Middle East becoming uninhabitable later this century.
Where will these people go?
Who will support them?
How will governments deal with the crisis?

Re:Refugees

[hey!]

Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.

Now India is an entirely different case. It's a democracy, which is more stable than a hereditary dictatorship. It has a much larger, more robust, more diversified economy than Syria. All around it's a far more competently run society, despite the challenges it faces like endemic poverty. But it's also 50x larger in population. A much smaller relative disturbance in India can translate into a huge problem on an absolute scale. It's long-running dispute with Pakistan, and the fact that both are nuclear armed regional powers, adds quite a range of unpleasant outcomes to even a modest destabilization of India.

Re:Refugees

[ClickOnThis]

And that brings us to the inevitable large-scale consequence of climate change: war.

Re: The Planet Has a Fever

[Anonymous Coward]

The only cure is more cowbell...

Re:I love the hypocrisy...

[PvtVoid]

OB xkcd.

Re:The man in the mirror

[presidenteloco]

Well we still have to figure out an effective strategy to deal with the sociopathic douchebags.