How very fucked is India? Right now, in Kama Sutra terms, Climate is doing the pushcart on India on the back of a pissed-off tiger. The May heatwave, now extending into June, in the southern and western interior of the country has killed 17 million chickens, who, truth be told, had a mighty shitty life to begin with. Temperatures reached between 115 and 120 for days on end, and that's pretty much what slowly roasting is like. This is a double whammy to the Indian economy. With 10% of all the nation's chickens dead, the price of poultry has risen 35% and demand for food to feed the chickens has plunged, along with the already low price for corn and soybeans. Maybe capitalists will understand this to mean "not good."
Let's put this in terms everyone can understand:
The current heatwave in large chunks of India is now the fifth worst one in the world since records have been kept. Wanna guess when the rest of the top five occurred? Yeah, all in the last 17 years: 2003, 2010, 2006, and 1998. Since India already has over 2300 dead so far this year and number 4, 1998 in India, had just over 2500 deaths, well, we might have to narrow that time span to a dozen years.
Heat waves have become so common in the late spring in India in the last two decades that it's pretty much now "the weather," as in the definition of "climate changed." Cities and towns are supposed to have plans in place to try to mitigate heat deaths, but, in a touchingly American-like refusal to react to what's happening in the world around them, most Indian local governments have no such Heat Action Plan.
Luckily, a monsoon is approaching, arriving on the southern coast on June 4, it is predicted, which is a bit later than usual. That means a few million more dead chickens. And at least a few hundred more dead humans.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the floods that have wrecked much of east and central Texas have also ended the long drought in those regions. It would have been nice for that rain to have been spread out over the last few years instead of in one big gush, but, hey, climate change taketh and climate change giveth. The ways of climate change shall not be questioned because climate change doesn't give a shit about your opinion. Or your chickens.
