India is among world's hottest

etteri Taalas in Bonn on Monday. (AFP)

JAYANTA BASU, TT, Bonn: India is quickly becoming one of the hottest countries in the world, which is triggering significant weather impacts and affecting its economy, the head of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday.

Temperature trends, including patterns of maximum highs, in recent years suggest that India is among countries intensely impacted by global warming, said Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general.

"India is definitely becoming one of the hottest countries ... A huge population has been affected. India's per capita income has suffered significantly due to a temperature rise beyond one degree," Taalas told The Telegraph on the sidelines of a global climate change conference to bolster an international climate treaty from which the US plans to withdraw.

The WMO said temperatures this year would be slightly less than during a record-breaking 2016 and roughly level with 2015 as part of a global warming trend driven by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

"We have witnessed extraordinary weather," said Taalas, pointing to extreme events, including a spate of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Caribbean, monsoon floods in Asia and drought in East Africa.

He said the dip from last year was largely because an El Nino event that released extra heat from the Pacific Ocean in 2016 had faded. The El Nino phenomenon is a subtle warming of the Pacific Ocean surface waters linked to weather worldwide.

"As a matter of fact, 2017 is the hottest year on record without El Nino," Taalas added.

On April 21 this year, 12 of the world's 15 hottest towns lay in India with day temperatures crossing 45 degrees C. A year before, Phalodi in Rajasthan had shattered the national heat record of 60 years with 51 C, the highest since records began amid a nation wide heat wave.

Conference delegates said sweltering temperatures and weather extremes were a spur for action at the annual conference in Bonn from November 6 to 17, which seeks to work on a detailed rulebook for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and try to step up action before 2020.

"This is our moment of truth," Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, presiding at the Bonn talks, told delegates, urging them to "lock arms with all other nations and move forward together."

US President Donald Trump, who doubts mainstream scientific findings that man-made greenhouse gases are the primary cause of climate change, said in June he would pull out of the Paris agreement and instead promote fossil fuels.

None of the speakers at the opening ceremony mentioned Trump by name.

A UN list of delegates counts 48 Americans, mostly technical experts and many fewer than in recent years. The US delegation office in a tent village in Bonn has less space, for instance, than those for France or Italy.

Additional reporting from Reuters