MOHAMMAD AL-MASUM MOLLA

Sudden temperature drops in winter, sweltering and frequent heatwaves in summer, poor rainfall during monsoon, and four cyclones marked this year, and the experts blame it on climate change.

Heatwaves swept over the country for 62 days -- 24 days in April, 22 days in May, and 16 days in June, according to the Bangladesh Meteorological Department data.

Dhaka recorded the highest temperature in 58 years, 40.6 degrees Celsius, on April 16. The very next day, the people of Ishwardi endured a temperature of 43 degrees Celsius, the highest in the country this year.

The country witnessed the effects of four cyclones -- Mocha in May, Hamoon in October, Midhili in November, and Michaung in December.

Experts said erratic weather patterns have become a major concern for Bangladesh, one of the worst climate change-affected countries.

“Extremes are changing in frequency and intensity due to global warming,” said Prof AKM Saiful Islam, one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.

“Although it is difficult to link individual extremes or with one year’s data to long-term climate change, it is evident that we have seen extreme and rare events in this decade as an early sign of climate change,” he told The Daily Star.

In a recent report, the World Weather Attribution, an international coalition of scientists, said the April heatwave in Southeast Asia was a once-in-200-year event and without the human-caused climate change it would have been “virtually impossible”.

Bazlur Rashid Khan, a meteorologist at the BMD, said, “We observed that temperatures were above 36 degrees Celsius almost nationwide for more than 15 days at a stretch. We also saw that in winter temperature drops were sudden and by a large margin. This has a multifaceted impact

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