Aruna Chandrasekhar in Equator:
For anyone maintaining an extreme weather checklist, Mumbai’s got it all. We have catastrophic urban flooding, with every monsoon bringing old and new horrors: landslides killing dozens, people wading miles in waist-deep water in the dark with only phone torches to guide them home. In winter, Mumbai now clocks bad air days to rival Delhi’s – even though, unlike the capital, we have no farmers burning their crop stubble next door to conveniently blame. As oceans warm, intensifying Arabian Sea cyclones inch closer to the city.
Then there’s the heat.
To be clear: Mumbai was not on the list of the world’s hottest 50 cities in April – all of which, cataclysmically, lay in India. Mumbai’s is not the kind of heat that lodges itself in the foreign correspondent’s imagination, or recalls Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, in which more than 20 million people die in the furnace of a north Indian heatwave.
But the Mumbai heat can be more insidious than the 40C+ weeks that have now been baked into the summers of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Daytime air temperatures are in the high 30s, while wet-bulb temperatures, which measure humidity as well as air temperature, hover around an oppressive 28C. (A WBT of 35C is considered the limit of human survival.) It’s the humidity that gets you. In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate – which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.
More here.
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