Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

If I could, I’d send some cool weather (vibes) from Bengaluru to parts of northern India. Colleagues (experiencing heatstroke), friends, and family, are not just suffering, they also make me feel guilty about the cool clime I have in my city. 

Real-time good weather isn’t transferable, but human activity has induced large-scale bad natural phenomena in the most surprising ways.

Last week, this piece of news blew me away: over the last 40 years, as Europe and the US cleaned up their ambient air (and South and East Asia made it worse for the sake of economic and industrial growth), they also triggered increased tropical cyclone frequency in their backyards. Which is to say, reducing air pollution was good for the global north’s public health, but it was bad in terms of annual economic and human losses from hurricanes.

For the first time, human-induced aerosols (air pollution, in other words) are being shown to be responsible for increased cyclones in some parts of the world, including in the northern Indian Ocean. 

A spate of new data released in the past two weeks has added to the evidence that it’ll take the global village to solve our climate challenges, however much we may resort to the Nimby (not-in-my-back-yard) mindset for tough local solutions.