Guest essay by Kip Hansen – October 10, 2022
Monsoon. Life gives. Life is happening. Bringing both joy and sorrow to the whole of India. As always. It is believed by some that India’s history was defined by the monsoon and its change over time. Prayers are said to the goddess Mariamman to bring a favorable monsoon.
India’s monsoon is the most important meteorological event in India every year – a good monsoon means lush crops and prosperity for millions of farmers and is a key factor in economic well-being. economy of India, it is predicted, monitored and reported by the central bank of India.
But while India’s monsoon can be pretty accurately predicted, it’s not always the same from year to year, region to region or place to place.
Some years it rains too much in one place and too little in another. Some years are drought years and some are flood years. Some years are both.
Henry Fountain, a climate reporter for the Times, and Saumya Khandelwal stated in a recent article NY Times Highlights that:
“Monsoons are becoming more extreme – the monsoons in South Asia are culturally and economically closely linked to much of Asia. Climate change is making it increasingly intense and erratic.”
This is a special “interactive” feature, which means the cool effects were created by a special graphics team at the NY Times. Check it out at the link given above. Unfortunately, like many before it, it’s basically “beautiful photos used as propaganda”.
Just check the claims in the subheading: Climate change is making the southwest monsoon 1) Increasingly intense and 2) erratic. Henry Fountain Double this statement with this: “Now, however, across South Asia, climate change is making monsoons more erratic, less dependent, and even more dangerous, with rainfall. more intense as well as worse droughts.”
Let’s see if these statements are true:
More and more violent, more intense rainfall:
From this year’s recap of Monsoon season 2022 from India Meteorological Department (IMD), we have this five-year summary chart:
The graph shows the number of “heavy rain events” at the bottom – both “heavy only” (labeled > 115.6 and <204,5) và "cực kỳ nặng" (có nhãn> 204.5) for each year. We found that over the past five years, extremely heavy downpours fell by 321, 554, 341, 273 and 296, with only 2019 being unusually larger. The same is true for heavy rain events. But 2020, 2021, 2022 is quite normal, with less numbers in these years. So at least the last five years have not seen “more intense rain”.
More erratic, less reliable:
Monsoon means rainfall during the monsoon season, so to be “more erratic, less dependent”, we should look at precipitation falling much lower, or much higher, than the seasonal normal:
This is a one hundred and twenty-one year record, meticulously kept by the government of India, precisely because monsoon rains mean prosperity or disaster for the people of India this year. another year. Years outside the area highlighted in green – designated by IMD as Normal +/- 10% – are years of too much rain and not enough rain. The years outside the shaded area are the bad flood years and the bad drought years. There are always some years in the current decade that are out of the ordinary.
We see that years outside the normal are rare in the last 30 years – 1962-1992 saw more outside the normal (green) band than 1992-2022. Instead of being more erratic and less reliable, the most recent climate period (30 years) has been much more reliable and less erratic compared with the previous two periods 30 years ago.
That said, the monsoon that India gets every year is the monsoon that India gets. Some years are better than others. Some years are geographically more evenly spread, some are “more pronounced” with too much rainfall here and too little here. That’s what we call weather and as always.
Conclusion:
That’s not right that “Monsoon is getting more extreme – Climate change is making it more and more aggressive and erratic.”
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Author’s comment:
I wrote about the monsoon before in Indian Monsoon 2019 – Blessing or Curse? Nothing has changed since then, except that mainstream media has become more and more compliant with the requirement that journalists exaggerate and bias any and all news that could have to do with weather and climate – the need for which all stories assert that there is a clear Climate Crisis in every story.
There will be others more knowledgeable than I am writing about this year’s monsoon – it’s a hot topic – and a pretty popular monsoon season summary.
Thanks for reading.
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