THOUGHT FOR A HOT SUMMER

June 27, 2026

Nikunja Bihari Sahu

The hot summer days are back with vengeance! With the daytime temperatures soaring over 400C in many parts of the state , the current season promises to be painfully hot. Interior districts of Odisha are boiling with sweltering heat driven by hot and dry westerly winds and key cities like Jharsuguda, Titlagarh, and Sambalpur are recording temperatures close to 450C inflicting awesome agony and suffering for people.

Gone are the days when the summer in our childhood village days was so pleasant and soothing. The cool refreshing southerly breezes of the evening, the cuckoo’s melodious song in the meadows, cricket’s sonorous tune reverberating the quiet afternoons, the smell of mango buds swept away by the winds and people enjoying playing cards under late moon-lit nights- all revive the sweet memories of the ancient village life. So, what has gone wrong these days?

Scientists are attributing this unusual situation to global warming which is emerging as one of the greatest environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. According to IPCC, our planet has warmed by 0.60C over the last century and it is projected that the Earth’s mean temperature is likely to rise 2.4 to 4.8 0C by the year 2100. Smashing all temperature records, 11 of the warmest years of the past 125 years occurred only after 1990 with 2005 being the warmest year on record. The year 2005 was characterized by exceptionally high temperatures in the northern hemisphere and a significant surge in sea-surface temperatures.

Intense heat waves in 2003 took a toll of around 35,000 people in the whole of Europe including 15,000 lives in France alone. About 700 million people in India depending directly on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forests and fisheries for their livelihood will directly face the brunt of the climate change induced by global warming. Even animals are not spared from the wrath of nature’s fury. The Polar bear in the melting ice sheets of the Arctic, the Royal Bengal tigers in India’s fragile mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, the Right whale in the plankton-poor waters of the warming North Atlantic, and the Orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by frequent bushfires and droughts are some of the survivors of this ecological crisis.

Global warming has proved to be very harsh to our state Odisha also. Atmospheric temperature is consistently surging in coastal and interior cities including the state capital Bhubaneswar with summer seasons turning out to be painfully unbearable. Gone are the days in the capital city when the cool southerly breeze used to lash the summer evenings much to the delight of the residents. Low pressure weather conditions and depressions are becoming regular incidents causing unpredictable rainfall patterns across the state much to the woes of farmers. Who can forget the scorching hot summer days of 1998 when hundreds of people died of heat wave related incidents and the devastating Super cyclone of 1999 that claimed thousands of lives in coastal Odisha. Frequent floods and famines in the following years battered the lives of the people and shattered the economy of the state. The sea has also posed a serious threat to the state. The Bay of Bengal is expanding towards the coastal landscape at an alarming rate taking many villages and fertile farmlands into its grip thereby seriously threatening the livelihood of the native villagers.

Keeping these grave consequences in mind, world leaders have met at several climate summits in the past to find a solution with the Rio Summit in 1992 serving as the launching pad. The following Kyoto Protocol (1995), Copenhagen Accord (2009), Paris Agreement (2015), Glasgow Climate Pact (2021), the UAE Consensus (2023) and the Brazil summit (2025) have yielded little tangible progress. Given the turmoil and turbulence in the world political scenario as mentioned above our mantra should be to ‘Think globally and Act locally’. We can directly reduce our carbon footprints by curbing personal energy consumption, utilizing public transit system and adopting energy-efficient appliances.

Education Officer

Regional Science Centre

Pt Jawaharlal Nehru Marg

Bhubaneswar-751013

The Orissa Post dtd 22.05.26

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