This year — though winter is officially over only on February 28 — the average minimum has already touched 15°C.
MUMBAI: Does winter seem a little shorter this year? Has it suddenly become warm in barely a few weeks? It’s not your imagination. According to the Indian Meteorology Department, Colaba, the average minimum temperature right through winter last year hovered around 11.4°C. This year — though winter is officially over only on February 28 — the average minimum has already touched 15°C. Northerly winds that cool the city and bring down the mercury every winter did not arrive either this time, says Met director Sathi Devi. A change in wind patterns caused easterly and north-easterly winds to impede the cooling winds from the upper reaches of the country.
If Mumbaikars are puzzled by the recent, extreme weather changes — including the floods of July 26, 2005 and last year’s hot summer — the answer may lie in the report released by the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Paris on Friday. The fourth assessment report, as it is called, is a stronger indictment of the role of human beings in global warming than before. Experts who drew up the report say human intervention is “very likely” that main cause of climate change, putting it at about 90 per cent probable. In the last report in 2001, the IPCC put human the factor as a “likely” - or about 66 per cent probable - cause.
While environmental scientists in the city are reluctant to connect one-time incidents like 26/7 or this year’s winter to the bigger picture of climate change, they make no bones about human culpability. “We have had a more brief winter this year,” says Rakesh Kumar, head of the Mumbai zonal office of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI).
“It has become warmer sooner than expected, and we’ve had more smog this time than previously. And all of this goes back to us polluting our air with greenhouse gases, vehicle emissions and industrial waste.”
Adds Dr CVV Bhadram, deputy director general of the Met department: “Mumbai’s maritime climate does not allow for a perceptible change in winter temperatures, but we have had extreme variations in temperature this time, even between different neighbourhoods in the city.”
For instance, she says, there is a big difference in temperatures between Santa Cruz and Colaba - a phenomenon called micro-climatology - and pollution, the growth of ‘heat islands’ due to industrialisation and disappearing green cover has led to this. “Buildings in Mumbai’s concrete jungle absorb radiation from the sun and re-radiate the heat,” says Dr Bhadram, creating pockets of high temperature. This winter has been no exception.
“The effects of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami and the Mumbai floods are all comparable,” says Dr Shyam Asolekar of the Centre for Environmental Studies and Engineering at IIT, Powai. “I’m afraid what the IPCC has predicted, about human intervention, is certainly true of Mumbai too.”
Green activist Sunjoy Monga, however, feels whether or not it’s premature to link the recent happenings in the city to the bigger picture of climate change, it’s true that environment is in worse shape than before. “It is warmer today than it was say, some years ago,” he says. “Question is, what are we doing about a solution?”
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