For the past week or so the daily maximum temperature in Lucknow has been above 40 °C. Yesterday it was 42°C, and more of the same is forecast for the next five days. In these temperatures the demand for electricity to power air conditioning units exceeds supply and we have experienced frequent outages sometimes lasting hours. Without electricity to drive pumps, the water supply also fails.

It is sobering to think that in a warming world such events are bound to become more commonplace, not just here but across all the lower latitudes. We in the UK will not be immune either as summer heatwaves like that of 2003, which claimed so many lives across continental Europe, are forecast to increase in frequency and severity.

To help improve those forecasts we have been working on improving the warm climate performance of a technique that uses leaf architecture as a proxy for temperature and rainfall. By applying this technique to fossil leaves we can better quantify ancient climates, many of which were warmer than now, and thereby learn how climate might behave in the future.

Normally solitary, giant squirrels are
rarely seen together except about
breeding time.
[Photo © copyright Bob Spicer]

Recently I sampled six forests in Kerala, south India. At a latitude of around 9.5 °N they are well within the tropical zone, yet unlike many low latitude areas, they also experience marked variations in rainfall due to the influence of the Asian Monsoon. They never really dry out though, and so those lush forests host a large number of leeches that make sampling leaves a somewhat bloody affair. Apart from leeches the forests also support a rich variety of animal life such as giant squirrels (Ratufa indica), deer, and even wild elephants. Although Kerala promotes itself as a “green” state there are precious few undisturbed forests remaining. Most have been destroyed to plant tea and the destruction continues as multinational corporations have the power to buy up land and overpower conservation efforts. Soon there will be very little natural vegetation left save for a few protected reserves, with a consequent loss of biodiversity. Of course Kerala is not alone in losing its unique heritage this way, but it is particularly depressing to witness it first hand.

Tea plantations replace natural forest diversity, leaving only a few remnant trees as witnesses to what once was.
[Photo © copyright Bob Spicer]

Leaves from each of these modern sites are numerically scored and analysed using a technique called CLAMP. Results so far show that all the Kerala sites form a coherent cluster in a new area of what we call “physiognomic space” and thus provide opportunities for recalibrating CLAMP for low latitudes, both now and in the past.

This is exactly what we were hoping for. Now I am in the process of collecting and collating decades worth of weather observations for these areas so that the calibration process can take place. At least I will continue to do that if the power stays on and the computers don’t overheat.

About the author

Bob Spicer is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Open University. Founding Director of the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) his interests are broad. However he is most at home when studying how plants can be used to tell us about ancient climates, and how that information can help us plan for managing our planet in the future.

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This morning, as I flipped through the sixty plus television channels available in Lucknow, I came across a news item reporting the damage to crops here in India being wrought by “unusual” weather. The problem is not just that this year happens to have a strong “La Nina” current in the Pacific and that is affecting weather globally, but that this year’s problems are part of a pattern that has developed over recent years.

The dry season in India normally runs from about September to around July. The exact duration depends on the year, and the timing of the beginning and end varies across the country. In the past few years heavy rainstorms have punctuated the dry season causing devastation to crops and flooding. In the last few days we have had several such storms here in Lucknow, but a few weeks ago the most severely devastated area was Kerala, south India, where some nine people reportedly perished.

In Kerala the state government was forced to compensate farmers for the loss of their crops to the tune of millions of rupees. This wet spell also impacted the wildlife in the region. Within a week of the storms I visited Kerala to sample the forests there as part of the CLAMP development research. While in the extensive natural forests that make up the  the Periyar Tiger Reserve I noticed that, as I walked, the forest floor around me appeared to ripple as if it were water.

Closer inspection revealed that the movement was due to thousands of small frogs undergoing a migration from the river where they spent their tadpole stage to higher land. Normally this migration occurs at the beginning of the monsoon season and saves the frogs from being washed away as the rivers rise. In the constant wetness of the monsoon season the frogs are able to survive away from the rivers.

Whole populations of migrating frogs face death due to unseasonal rains.
[photo © copyright Bob Spicer]

Now however the migrating frogs are faced with mass mortality because the monsoon has not started and their premature migration is taking them to dry uplands where the lack of water will kill them.

In contrast, too much water is a killer elsewhere. In Bihar state, northeastern India, rapid fluctuations in the flow of the river Ganges has led to flooding and the death of many people who farm the floodplain. These violent fluctuations have been attributed to loss of the snow pack and glaciers in the Himalayas and Tibet, coupled with heavy downpours on the Gangetic plains. For the poor, malnutrition and disease follow loss of crops

As I have said before in these blogs, increased dry season precipitation and more erratic monsoon rains are exactly what we could expect from a warming on the Tibetan Plateau. It is likely that the future will bring more of the same weather-related problems.

If the “La Nina” event in the Pacific is linked to inconvenient spring weather in the UK and elsewhere, India faces more serious problems. Climate change is already devastating what is often marginal farming activity, but farming that is crucial to India’s ability to adequately feed its 1 billion (and rising) population.

Here there are demonstrations against food price inflation. This inflation is stoked by global demand for basic grain stocks:  a demand amplified by the use of crops, or farmland they are grown, on for biofuel production. I fear that this is only the beginning of global unrest resulting from climate change. India is taking the issue of climate change and all its consequences seriously, and has just announced the establishment of a national climate change centre in Chennai (Madras) so that it can prepare for an uncertain future.

About the author

Bob Spicer is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Open University. Founding Director of the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) his interests are broad. However he is most at home when studying how plants can be used to tell us about ancient climates, and how that information can help us plan for managing our planet in the future.

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Since my early visits to India in the mid 1990s it is true to say that there has been something of a revolution in air quality in many of the cities here. In my last blog I mentioned the Taj Mahal. Vehicles are now banned from within 0.5 km of the fragile marble structure lest pollution destroys its beauty. This ban is complete and even the surrounding lawns were being cut by oxen pulling an industrial sized mower, instead of the usual noisy and dirty petrol-driven contraptions.

Polluting vehicles are banned from the Taj Mahal, so mowing green is the order of the day.
Photo © copyright Bob Spicer

However in Delhi in 1998 I remember literally choking on black soot-laden air in the evening rush hour. Most of the pollution was coming from the small three-wheeled autorickshaws or “tuk-tuks”. These ran on low-grade fossil fuel that was inefficiently burned in unsophisticated engines. Now all that has changed. In a draconian move, at the time unpopular but necessary, such vehicles were banned from the road across India and replaced with tuk-tuks running on compressed natural gas (CNG). This burns cleaner without the sooty particulates and can be made from renewable sources such as farm waste.

In Agra I saw what must have been close to a hundred tuk-tuks waiting in line to be filled with CNG. These vehicles, and their slightly larger cousins the Vikrams (which also run on CNG) provide a valuable public service in that for the modest sum of around 8 rupees (approximately 10p) you can be taken across town some 4km. This is often an exciting ride dodging in and out of the traffic, going the wrong way up dual carriageways and careering around the inevitable cow, buffalo or even elephant. However in a Vikram almost always you are sharing the experience with up to ten others crammed into a space about the size of the interior of a smallest of UK family cars - friendly, but very efficient.

Upon my return to Lucknow I went to the BBC News website to catch up on world events only to find an email there from someone recently returned from India. They had been stunned by the apparent road chaos here and complained that any attempt by the government to encourage “green” behaviour in the UK would be entirely negated by traffic growth in countries like India.

This is an often-used excuse for us in the more affluent parts of the world to do nothing in respect of tackling climate change. However it betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of traffic here. In India per capita private car ownership is a mere fraction of what it is in the UK, the cars are, on the whole, much smaller, and the vast majority of vehicles are, like the tuk-tuks and Vikrams, public service vehicles.

In Lucknow at least 20% of road vehicles are pedal rickshaws operated by farmers who rent the rickshaws by the day for around 30 rupees and make a living between sowing and harvesting taking people around the city in a low pollution, low carbon, way. Scooters and small motorcycles also abound. Although not very clean, they have a far better fuel consumption than the average UK car which on the commute runs tend to carry only the driver.

To be sure, as the Indian economy grows the car manufacturers will do their best to encourage the new Indian affluent to indulge their fantasies of the great green outdoors by driving all over it and destroying it further. TV ads here show a big, bright, shiny 4x4 charging across pristine wetland wilderness churning it into a quagmire, all in the name of appreciating “the environment”.

If only one in a hundred Indians bought such a vehicle, and did as the ads suggest, it would mean 10 million of them trashing the countryside. The antisocial consequences of owning such vehicles for purely leisure purposes, whether in the countryside or in towns (where, if you are interested in going anywhere, or even parking, small is practical), are becoming obvious here just as they are in the UK.

In cities and towns like Lucknow the smart money is on the status quo in that it represents high fuel efficiency per capita and low cost. However things are far from perfect. If only people here would obey some kind of highway code things would operate even better. As it is, it appears to be the one in front who has the right of way and it seems that nobody ever signals, looks left, right, or in their mirror before manoeuvring! At times it just seems like survival of the fittest.

About the author

Bob Spicer is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Open University. Founding Director of the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) his interests are broad. However he is most at home when studying how plants can be used to tell us about ancient climates, and how that information can help us plan for managing our planet in the future.

Subscribe to Bob Spicer's posts