Indian monsoons may fail due to climate change

Zee News: Global warming caused by extensive human interference in the environment will likely result in failure of Indian monsoon in the next 200 years threatening food supplies, a new study has warned. The study suggests that increased human activity like burning of fossil fuels and related shifts in tropical air flows, which has lead to drastic climate change, could result in collapse of monsoon rains about every fifth year between 2150 and 2200.

India being an agrarian society entirely depends on the monsoons, which lasts from June to September. India last faced a severe widespread drought in 2009 and had to import sugar, pushing global prices to a 30-year high.

The researchers defined monsoon "failure" as a fall in rainfall (between 40 and 70 percent) below normal levels. Such a drastic decline has not happened any year in records dating back to 1870 by the India Meteorological Department, they said.

"Monsoon failure becomes much more frequent" as temperatures rise, Anders Levermann, a professor of dynamics of the climate system and one of the authors at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was quoted as saying by a news agency.  "In the past century, the Indian monsoon has been very stable. It is already a catastrophe with 10 percent less rain than the average," Levermann said....

Monsoon floods in Ambala, shot by Harsh Mangal, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license