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From Greenland to India

Sara Wolcott | Monday 7th September 2009

On the off chance you haven't enough reasons to want to reduce your country's (or your company's) CO2 emissions, India's leading climate scientist has come up with a new one: no more (or at least weaker) monsoons in India.

Despite the general unpopularity of monsoons, this is not a good thing. Monsoons are critical to Indian climate.

Bhupendra Nath Goswami is the director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune. He said that the Greenland ice melt will add more freshwater to the north Atlantic Ocean. Less salty waters could weaken the circulation of ocean waters and temperature variations over the Indian subcontinent. This, in turn, could weaken the Indian summer monsoon.

Goswani's response - get better models to predict the effect of climate change on monsoons. Why? So they can plan - plan new/different infrastructure, adapt development plans, plan different crops in different places, and try to adapt as much as possible to an already changing environment. Right now, there are not enough climate scientists in india - or enough computers to do the computing power. If you are looking for cool career and you like playing with meterological models, you might choose this one....

But models are rarely the only answer, and they can only be relied upon up to a point. Immediate change of behavioral patterns on the part of Western countries are needed immediately.

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