Week 3: India

Leh: I Heard You Wanted Proof of Climate Change

This week, we spent our time in Leh, the capital of the Ladakh union territory in Northern India.

Leh, Ladakh

Situated in the mountains, close to the Himalayas, Leh is a place of mild temperatures, much cooler than its surrounding Indian regions, where the nights can even be considered cold. As a site of many religious monuments and picturesque landscapes, it's a popular tourist destination.

Nirvana Retreat

Nirvana Retreat was the name of our lodging for the week, a collection of mini resorts overlooking the city with a beautiful backdrop of mountains. This place was undeniably a wonderful place for us to stay in.

For the first few days of the trip, the greatest struggles we faced were the temperature shock, high-altitude sickness, and spotty Wi-Fi. As we prepared for our wargames and participated in lectures, it seemed like it wouldn't be much different from the previous parts of our trip in Delhi and Kathmandu. This would prove to be severely incorrect in the coming days.

Monsoons are nothing new in Leh.

The monsoon months range from July to August, but there's still a reason why Leh was referred to as a "cold desert". The rains fall, but not that much. For the first handful of days, there was only an occasional drizzle that was barely enough to wet the grass. In fact, the average rainfall in early July is 0.1 mm, an amount of water fitting for one of the driest climates in India.

This was not the case on July 8-9

On these two days, the rain recorded in Ladakh came in at 19.1 mm, more than 10,000% of the predicted amount. Flash flooding occurred all over the state, inundating local markets and overwhelming the infrastructure of many buildings. Of those buildings that weren't built for such levels of precipitation, the Nirvana Resort's buildings were no exception.

That day, coming back to our room after a long night of doing the coursework and some research for the climate change mitigation war game presentations, my roommate and I walked in to a large puddle covering much of the bedroom. Tracing its source, we saw that there were several leaks in the roof, which must have been dripping for a long time and had gotten all over many of my appliances as well.

After getting a new room and settling down, I would learn the next morning that this was far from a unique experience. Many of us on the Dialogue had had leaks, some of us even waking up in the middle of the night to a soaking wet bed. All across Ladakh, people were experiencing similar or worse.

Cars overturned and buried

Streets and houses flooded

For us, having come from the United States, we already weren't used to the new altitude and climate, and we were even less prepared to be part of such a disaster. Our country of origin, despite contributing so much to climate change, is free from experiencing the vast majority of those consequences. North America finds itself in a good natural place for economic development, a significant factor that many historians attribute to the rampant success of the United States. For places like Ladakh, a developing area in a corner of India, the punishment nature doles out for climate change is wildly disproportionate from its contribution.

The events of those two days are clearly far beyond the norm of what can be considered normal. Even if it were to be blamed purely on the natural variance that happens in the climate, a year over year change of 10,000% puts any of those concerns to rest. Natural variation would put it in the range of 5%, not in the 5 digits.

For me, this experience was incredibly valuable in that it was a potent reminder. A reminder that we are here to learn about climate change and methods to address or solve it, but to remember that it is not a purely mathematical or theoretical construct. It has real consequences, and further inaction will only lead to worse and worse outcomes for the most vulnerable parts of the population.

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