‘Jousting with apocalypse’
“Humanity has opened the gates to hell... Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects,” United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has warned. “We are sliding towards a 2.8-degree rise... The consequences will be devastating. Parts of our planet will be uninhabitable. And, for many, this is a death sentence.”
The intensifying extreme heat and climate volatility crises are delivering a double whammy to people all over India, raising new challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, as if he were not beleaguered enough already.
Indian high tech is a leader in this combat, which is on a global scale and has drawn several urgent warnings from Guterres and Celeste Saulo, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The UN and WMO estimate climate-related losses worldwide exceeding $4.3 trillion because intensifying extreme events are no longer localised. They are recurring macroeconomic threats that depress national wealth, fracture global supply chains, and exhaust public insurance systems.
WMO and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data reveal that extreme weather is directly destabilising India's fiscal health, inflation targets and rural banking sectors. Climate-induced disasters are estimated to cost India $10-14 billion annually, with long-term projections warning of a 10-15 per cent reduction in national wealth by 2050, if global temperatures rise by 2°C.
Referring to the heat rise, Saulo warned that data from WMO’s flagship atmospheric records officially marks 2015-25 as the hottest consecutive 11-year block ever documented on Earth. The global greenhouse gas build-up has forced our planet into uncharted ecological territory, because Earth’s energy imbalance has hit its highest mark in 65 years of record-keeping.
Saulo reported a moderate-to-strong El Niño event in the coming months that will greatly amplify regional weather volatility, extreme rainfall, prolonged droughts and persistently elevated heat. Both Guterres and Saulo underlined the need for much greater use of artificial intelligence (AI) in analysing climate movements and raising specific alerts for each of the world’s regions in a timely manner.
“The cost of constraint is not only financial,” Saulo warned. “When we defer capacity development in AI, we do not save money neutrally – we widen gaps that take a decade to close”. She was referring to the inability of poorer nations to access relevant AI models. “When we scale back scientific co-ordination, we erode the connective tissue of a global system that functions because it is global.”
But these warnings and alerts are falling on deaf ears because US President Donald Trump is deeply embroiled in the Iran and Israel wars and rejects mainstream climate science as a ‘hoax’ and a ‘green scam’ favouring China. He dismisses El Niño tracking infrastructure as overbearing regulation.
Trump has ordered the dismantling of a $368-million network of 900 deep-sea sensors across the Pacific, which will blind forecasters trying to model extreme El Niño weather patterns. He has also announced US withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In turn, the European Union (EU) is stymied by its very expensive proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and is tamping down on its earlier drive for combatting climate change, because of fears that it may tip into economic recession by this year-end.
Modi may soon be a rare valiant knight jousting with the advancing stallions of climate apocalypse. And money will be in woefully short supply. For example, the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss & Damage is struggling to get a hearing. It opened with initial foundational pledges, but a massive gap remains between current capital and the estimated $400 billion needed annually by vulnerable countries. Total initial commitments reached roughly $700 million, covering less than 0.2 per cent of the actual annual loss suffered by those nations.
A silver lining for Indians is that the country is emerging as a high-tech power in climate change mitigation and resilience. It ranks as the second largest global hub for solar cell and module assembly infrastructure in solar manufacturing; it is developing cobalt-free battery chemistries for electric vehicle technologies; it is using AI to reduce methane emissions in rice cultivation by 30 per cent; it is deploying satellite-driven parametric systems to protect millions of climate-vulnerable farmers and is conducting leading-edge research on hydrogen fuel.
India is widely respected as a global laboratory for climate tech that is leveraging its massive domestic market to pioneer scalable, low-cost solutions in green hydrogen, digital grid architectures, and space-based environmental monitoring. By combining heavy public funding with its world-class IT and aerospace engineering talent, our country is also actively exporting climate-resilient technologies to other developing nations.
The author is an international affairs columnist for Business India. He can be contacted at brijkk@gmail.com