For most of history, a heatwave was simply bad luck, an act of nature or of the gods that no one could be blamed for. Krishna AchutaRao belonged to the small group of scientists who changed that. He could look at a brutal Indian summer and calculate, in hard numbers, how much of its ferocity was the work of human hands. That quiet, difficult skill made him one of India’s most important climate voices, which is why the news of his death, on 4 September 2026 at the age of sixty-two, landed so heavily on the country’s scientific community.
