Extreme heat

According to a recent Business Insider article: Birds Are Falling From the Sky in India as a Record Heatwave Dries up Water Sources, May 14, 2022. And, it’s not just a few random instances: “Vets in an animal hospital in Ahmedabad said they had treated thousands of birds in recent weeks,” Ibid.

According to Yale Climate Connections: “The nearly ‘unsurvivable’ heat is increasingly as the result of human-caused climate change.”

Here’s a snippet from the Yale Climate Connections article entitled India and Pakistan’s Brutal Heat Wave Poised to Resurge: “Inferno-like temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees F). The heat, when combined with high levels of humidity – especially near the coast and along the Indus River Valley – will produce dangerously high levels of heat stress that will approach or exceed the limit of survivability for people outdoors for an extended period.”

According to the prestigious UK Met Office: “The blistering heat wave in northwest India and Pakistan was made over 100 times more likely because of human-caused climate change.”

The extraordinary blistering heat has prompted Umair Haque, a British economist (former blogger for the Harvard Business Review, but he attended University of Oxford, London Business School, and McGill University) to write a special article about the scenario entitled: The Age of Extinction Is Here – Some of Us Just Don’t Know It Yet published in Eudaimonia and Co, May 2022 in which he describes a world that has “already crossed the threshold of survivability.”

Umair has friends in the Indian Subcontinent. So, he hears first hand what’s happening without the filter of a news organization. Here’s one quote: “The heatwave there is pushing the boundaries of survivability. My other sister says that in the old, beautiful city of artists and poets, eagles are falling dead from the sky. They are just dropping dead and landing on houses, monuments, and shops. They can’t fly anymore.”

Here’s some more reporting from the streets, as related to Umair: “The streets, she says, are lined with dead things. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Animals of all kinds are just there, dead. They’ve perished in the killing heat. They can’t survive.”

People spend all day in canals and rivers and lakes. Some people line the streets passed out at the edge of life or death. He suggests the death count will not be known for some time and many probably won’t be counted.

Excerpted: ‘India – Birds Drop Out of the Sky, People Die’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org