Drought brings a flood of troubles

An editorial by Vikas Bajaj in New Straits Times: ...Drought has devastated crops around the world this year, including corn and soybeans in the United States, wheat in Russia and Australia and soybeans in Brazil and Argentina. This has contributed to a six per cent rise in global food prices from June to July, according to United Nations data.

India is experiencing its fourth drought in a dozen years, raising concerns about the reliability of the country's primary source of fresh water, the monsoon rains that typically fall from June to October.

Some scientists warn that such calamities are part of a trend that is likely to intensify in the coming decades because of climate changes caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. A paper published last month blamed global warming for a large increase in the percentage of the planet affected by extreme summer heat in the last several decades.

And the World Meteorological Organisation, a division of the UN, recently warned that climate change was "projected to increase the frequency, intensity and duration of droughts, with impacts on many sectors, in particular food, water and energy".

Scientists say that in addition to increasing temperatures, climate change appears to be making India and its neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh more vulnerable to erratic monsoons. Studies using 130 years of data showed big changes in rainfall in recent decades, said B. N. Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, a government-backed research organisation....

Drought affected area in Karnataka, shot by Pushkarv, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license