Within seconds, the scenic mountain valley resembled a war zone.“Guys, we have to run!” said a man filming the devastation unfolding in his hillside town in northern India on Sunday, as a landslide set off by incessant monsoon rains sent heavy rocks tumbling down a steep slope.
At least nine people were killed when a boulder struck their vehicle. Their deaths added to a toll of at least 164, with 100 reported missing, on the country’s western coast, where heavy rains have deluged entire towns and villages.
India’s monsoons have always arrived with fury. But the scenes of death and destruction playing out in the country are yet another reminder of the urgency of climate change, experts say. A warming climate means extreme rainfall in many parts of the world, scientists have said.
Record rainfalls in central China and Western Europe have killed scores in recent weeks and displaced many others. On Saturday, the authorities in the Philippines evacuated thousands of residents after a tropical storm flooded the capital, Manila, and nearby provinces
In the last few months, India, a nation of 1.4 billion people, has experienced two powerful cyclones and deadly floods in the Himalayas. It has also suffered through extreme temperatures, including a heat wave that killed thousands of people.
Scientists have warned that extreme weather is likely to become more common and more intense in the coming decades as sea levels rise and the Indian Ocean becomes warmer.
“The threat of rising sea level is something that we often overlook and underestimate,” said Roxy Koll, a climate scientist in India and one of the authors of a study released last week on how a warming climate will make heat waves and cyclones more frequent and more ferocious in India.
“Climate change is a threat multiplier,” the authors, Mr. Koll and Chirag Dhara, an assistant professor at Krea University in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, wrote in the study. “In the absence of rapid, informed and far-reaching mitigation and adaptation measures, the effects of climate change are likely to pose profound challenges to sustaining the country’s rapid economic growth.”
India’s agrarian economy depends heavily on monsoon rain. Too little means a drought, and too much can cause catastrophic flooding. Extreme rainfall washes away fertile topsoil, while droughts deplete groundwater reserves that have been declining rapidly in many parts of the country for years. Together, they have caused misery and death on India’s farms.