Record-Breaking Heat Wave In India Threatens Residents, Crucial Wheat Harvest (nbcnews.com) 90
A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country's wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine. NBC News reports: With some states in India's breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with highs of 120 Fahrenheit this week, observers fear a range of lasting impacts, both local and international, from the hot spell. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month that India could step in to ease the shortfall created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The two countries account for nearly a third of all global wheat exports, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the conflict could leave an additional 8 million to 13 million people undernourished by next year.
India's wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels -- some 122 million tons -- in 2022. But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time. The heat wave is hitting India's main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh's Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.
India's wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels -- some 122 million tons -- in 2022. But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time. The heat wave is hitting India's main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh's Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.
But...but...global warming isn't real! (Score:1)
It can't be 120 F there! Global warming doesn't exist! Fake news! /obvious sarcasm
India not the same as Indiana (Score:2)
But I wouldn't expect someone who barfs all over forums to know that.
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With simple irrigation and modern chemical fertilizers, sweet potato is probably the best in terms of calories per acre you can grow in a hot climate. Without modern technology or labor, then sweet potato is not the more effective way to feed everyone.
If you're out to make money, then you should grow crops that rich countries like to eat lots of. Like wheat. Even if India isn't necessarily selling wheat to Europe, it ends up being a valuable commodity on the free market. And goes to areas like North Africa
Re:So plant sweet potatoes instead... (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet potatoes require more water and labor than wheat, and are much harder to store and ship.
Sweet potatoes are high in calories and vitamins, but low in protein. Children subsisting on sweet potatoes can suffer from kwashiorkor [wikipedia.org], a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency.
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They don't sell well because they are hard to store and ship. And I also covered the irrigation issue.
A mix of crops is better nutritionally than mono agriculture. It's not just protein deficiency to worry about but an incomplete diet. Soybeans or some other high protein source can be a good option. Sweet potato greens are good animal fodder and perfectly fine for humans.
Or everyone can grow wheat and have a famine. Because that's what pays the best I guess.
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So the world goes low carb this year.
With the obesity spreading around the world, maybe going keto is a happy side effect of these events!
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low carb and keto diets are for rich people. Make everyone rich first, then we can talk.
Re: So plant sweet potatoes instead... (Score:2)
You guys complaining about storing and shipping need to try the new pastas made largely from lentil and sweet potato. Random one:
https://www.organikthings.com/... [organikthings.com]
I have had variants that are nearly superfoods, so satisfying.
Re: So plant sweet potatoes instead... (Score:2)
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As usual...No common sense (Score:1)
a farmer from Uttar Pradesh's Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.
And yet no one will make the obvious, common sense decision to stop exporting wheat.
Re:As usual...No common sense (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet no one will make the obvious, common sense decision to stop exporting wheat.
Export bans on agricultural commodities are a way to force poor rural people to subsidize wealthier urban people.
Farmers should receive a fair market price for their products. If that means exporting wheat, then so be it. The money earned from wheat exports can buy food unaffected by the war and in plentiful supply, such as rice.
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Farmers should receive a fair market price for their products. If that means exporting wheat, then so be it. The money earned from wheat exports can buy food unaffected by the war and in plentiful supply, such as rice.
Yes, let them eat sticky rice cakes. Seriously, farmers don't necessarily benefit from exports, if there are intermediaries that buy low and sell high. I think this is common knowledge, this being one of the reason why we have these so-called "ethical" or "fair" food product lines, the implication being that other brands come from sources where the farmers don't receive their fair share.
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Yes, let them eat sticky rice cakes.
Indians grow and eat long grain rice, which isn't sticky.
farmers don't necessarily benefit from exports
Not always, but if you produce X, you will usually benefit from more people buying X.
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Yes, let them eat sticky rice cakes.
Indians grow and eat long grain rice, which isn't sticky.
Right. I blendered my South and East Asian cuisine.
farmers don't necessarily benefit from exports
Not always, but if you produce X, you will usually benefit from more people buying X.
But there's also that gold rush tendency for especially profitable cash crops to transform a region's agriculture into a monoculture, banana republics being a notorious example. This is true of any enterprise, but agriculture is more susceptible to circumstances beyond current human control, more so than say, a hard drive factory that needs to be sanitized and restarted after a flood.
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And yet no one will make the obvious, common sense decision to stop exporting wheat.
India doesn't seem to take the obvious, common sense decision to stop burning coal and invest maximally in renewable energy, especially solar, where they have a real chance to become a world leader. Why should you expect any sensible policy anywhere else? Modi is a Putinbot.
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"US adventurism", "in Russia's back yard"
I see, so Ukranians don't get to have back yards and you're fine with that. Russians are allowed to "adventure" [wikipedia.org] in other people's countries but that's fine.
However, the US gives some weapons to another country to allow them to defend themselves and suddenly that's "US adventurism in Russia's backyard.". Do you have any form of morality?
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Your username is literal, isn't it? The Americans are paying for your freedom and then you want to blackmail them out of even more money. You are so entitled that you think that their money belongs to you and someone suggesting that they shouldn't be blackmailed out of it is a "thief". I have no idea who you are, which troll farm you come from, but however you justify your continued life to yourself, you could see through it with just a few moments of thought.
120 F ~= 48.89 C (Score:2, Informative)
For those outside of the small section of the world known as the United States (e.g. India):
120 F is approximately 48.89 C
112 F is approximately 44.44 C
109 F is approximately 42.78 C
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You just learn about non-whole numbers in school and you wanted to flex on Slashdot? Haha.
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The only 'points' kids learn about in US schools are hollow-points.
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it isn't hard to remember that 1000L = 264g. But also, at any of those times there would be other data I'm looking about the situation, and so I could type it into a web browser (or my calculator) and get the answer.
You either need a new web browser, or to learn what those units are.
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No, but you might need to learn what words are, so you can understand them. I get it, you were triggered. But you'll need to try a bit harder; even just to have said anything.
You could start with, "Yer rong," it would have more content.
It is very clear; Europeans do not have the intelligence, or the educational system, to handle two different systems of units. It's unfortunate for them that they chose scientific units for the common idiot; but it is great for America, because it means our precision is autom
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Studies have shown that using celsius results in lower estimation precision.
Same with kms, centimeters, etc.
OK so the "studies" show that Fahrenheit is better because it has smaller units but Centimetres and Kilometres are worse because they have smaller units. Right.
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Estimation precision goes down in both directions as you get away from the preferred range of numbers.
This is how stupid Celsius-makes-me-smarter guys are, right here.
Re: 120 F ~= 48.89 C (Score:2)
There is a difference between prediction precision and prediction accuracy. Prediction precision has no value unless it's also an accurate prediction.
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And you couldn't figure out if people routinely round off their prediction? Do people say 4km, or do they actually instead say 5km so they don't sound stupid, since nobody ever estimates anything at 4km?
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Well, the decimal point gives you tens as many subdivisions while the difference between C and F gives you less than twice as many. Conversely, F forces you to use three figures to define normal ambient temperatures while C lets you get away with two.
I think the problem here is the OPs use of approximation. 120F is approx 45C, 112F is about 44C and 109F is about 43C.
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0C == Cold; 100C == Dead
0K == Dead; 100K == Dead
0F == Very Cold; 100F == Very Hot
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Re:120 F ~= 49 C (Score:3)
No.
120 F is approximately 49 C
112 F is approximately 44.5 C
109 F is approximately 43 C
Don't add significant digits when they aren't there to start with.
Re: 120 F ~= 49 C (Score:2)
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Indeed. Also, these are environmental measurements, they are not that precise to begin with. Seems too many people do not have a Science-education worth anything these days. Or lack the common sense to use it.
For more logical people (Score:2)
Bad year for wheat. (Score:5, Informative)
Drought means a bad winter wheat harvest in the US. Ukraine is one of the largest wheat exporters in the world, and both planting and shipping has been disrupted by war, although Russian exports will benefit by high prices.
Ukrainian wheat is an important food supply in the Middle East and North Africa. With multiple countries facing a bad or disrupted wheat harvest, many countries dependent upon wheat imports may get politically destabilized by food price increases. Countries particularly dependent upon wheat imports: Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, China, Algeria and Bengladesh.
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Re:Bad year for wheat. (Score:4, Informative)
Climate a politically destabilizing factor. Initially it's not going to be *just* climate events. It's going to be an unlucky confluence of climate events with other crises, like the crop failure in Syria coinciding with high international wheat prices, displacing millions of young rural men to the cities where they were ripe for Islamist radicalization.
Right now it's China has me worried. It's the world's leading importer of food at a time of record high food prices. It's the world's largest importer of wheat AND the world's largest grower of wheat, and it just had a failed harvest at a time when world wheat supplies are disrupted. Normally this food thing wouldn't be too hard for China to handle, but with multiple economic, budgetary, and COVID crises going on, adding yet another is making me wonder -- and with a party congress coming up too. I wouldn't mind seeing regime change, but under the circumstances who knows which way change might go?
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Right now it's China has me worried. It's the world's leading importer of food at a time of record high food prices.
We can all worry about China later. The PRC still has enough balance of trade surplus to buy its way out of any food or raw materials crisis. It's when the global supply runs low that we should start worrying because then the PRC and other countries could go from market competition to trade warfare and even physical confrontation.
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Yep, and the drought West oft the Mississippi is going to nail the U.S. farmers there hard:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]
Profit over people again? (Score:1)
Call me shocked.
Capitalism at its finest.
Abolish biofuel mandates? (Score:5, Interesting)
There was an interesting article in New Scientist recently, suggesting that reducing the mandates for biofuels in the USA and EU could completely offset the lost grain production: https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
New Scientist generally has a very "green" editorial stance, so it seems unlikely that this is just a shill article funded by Exxon Mobil :-)
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New Scientist has a clickbait editorial stance, so it is funded equally by all their advertisers, not sponsored by individual ones.
They're not publishing that because it is news, or because there was some new science or study. They're publishing it because biofuel production has increased to partially offset sanctions on Russian oil, and so by publishing that now they can encourage controversy.
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For the poor, I would think food is far more important than fuel.
Prices of commodities are international.
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For the poor, I would think food is far more important than fuel.
In poor countries the price of food and the price of fuel are more closely related than you might think. Agriculture uses fuel to run machinery, it also takes fuel to produce fertilizer, it takes fuel to make pesticides, and it takes fuel to transport the food to market. The other two major costs, land and people are relatively stable, so fuel is responsible for a lot of the fluctuations in food price.
The poor also need fuel of some kind to cook their food, but that is often locally produced biomass which i
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So your point is what? Did you think that countries with large food exports have a goal of lowering the price of those exports through public policy?
If not, then the story might be obtuse clickbait that merely pretends to offer information on a public policy.
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They're not publishing that because it is news, or because there was some new science or study. They're publishing it because biofuel production has increased to partially offset sanctions on Russian oil, and so by publishing that now they can encourage controversy.
In fact there is a new study, and the New Scientist article links to it. It's open-access too, not hidden behind any paywall. I'll put the link here too: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/... [pnas.org]
in line with the New Scientist article, the study suggests that the Renewable Fuel Standard in the USA has led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
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What would be a more effective means to reduce CO2 emissions would be nuclear powered cargo ships, nuclear powered military ships, especially icebreakers were they operate in ecosystems that are highly sensitive to diesel fumes and oil spills. Icebreakers burn a lot of fuel because it takes a lot of power to break ice, and with the power and longevity of nuclear powered ships we could see more efficient shipping from more shipping lanes opened.
Russia has a huge fleet of conventional and nuclear powered ice
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I don't like the idea of biomass fuels because it is burning food. If taken too far it forces people to choose between freezing to death or starving to death. I don't mind corn ethanol fuel so much because I know it gives us a measure of energy independence and food security. The food security comes from knowing that we can stop burning our food at any time in order to get more food on the market overnight.
What we got from the Biden administration though was an increase in the use of corn ethanol fuel in
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You are only proving further just how out of touch Democrats are on solving our energy problems. The solution to high gasoline prices is not telling people to buy an electric car, it is removing barriers to the supply of more gasoline.
An often repeated argument for electric cars is the lower TCO, which may be true if comparing a new luxury car to another new luxury car. When comparing an electric car to a gasoline car the TCO of the electric car isn't going to be lower unless the electric car can be purch
Re:Abolish biofuel mandates? (Score:4, Interesting)
A sign of things to come - how fast though? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, this type of news is what so many people just don't get about a rapidly changing climate - food production.
So much of the FUD flying about, is related to *weather*, not climate.
"Oh, but gee, it was super cold here last winter! - global warming, what a crock of shit!"
A failure to see the joined up nature of world food trade is the problem, not understanding where so much of the food in the supermarkets actually comes from.
It comes down to one statement:
"The inability to produce grain at scale = end of civilisation"
It really is that simple.
So, we have a war in Ukraine, cutting a big chunk of food production and this heat wave in India, cutting another.
One of them isn't climate related, one is.
What happens when we have 3 events, or 4 events at this scale? ... 70 percent?
What happens when we have multiple events a year, over 3 or 4 years?
What happens when global harvests are down
Mass starvation, mass migration, war.
*This* is what rapid climate change means, in terms of collapse.
You can't just up and move billions and billions of hectares of crops - they grow where they do for a reason - and where would you move them?
It also isn't just going to be heat that ruins harvests, it will be floods, droughts, extreme storms and potentially even extreme cold at the wrong time.
What scientists still aren't sure of, is exactly how fast this will happen and whether we do actually have time to halt further catastrophe.
Some more extremist outliers, give us less than a decade, before crop production fails at significant volumes to cause civilisation collapse.
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Ok, lets be pedantic.
> One of these event's probability has been increased by the ongoing climate change. The other is just humans being dicks.
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My point being that right now we don't know if this is a one-time event or a long-term change.
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Point taken, however, this reality fits the models. For instance:
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
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One of them isn't climate related, one is.
Actually, neither of them is climate related, although one of them is being caused by the weather.
Clearly you don't understand what you are talking about.
The world is warming, which changes the climate.
We all know that our global climate is in constant flux, it always has been, it always will be.
We all know that human civilisation rose along with one of those global climate changes, which played out over a relatively long time.
Our planet naturally goes in and out of "cold earth" and "hot earth" phases - over many thousands of years.
Our planet and solar system can throw curve balls, that have the ability
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Either that, or you don't understand the point I'm making.
We all know that our global climate is in constant flux, it always has been, it always will be.
I've pointed that out here, numerous times but the AGW fanatics never seem to understand.
What I'm trying to point out is that this is the first time in recent history India has had such a severe heat wave, and we can't know yet if it's a one-time occurrence or if it's going to become a part o
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Its not one, two or three crises that are a problem, its the fifth to seventh that really get you.
I really like Rober H. Cline's tak on this, in the book 1177BC. Tying all the civilizations around the mediterranean sea together, connecting the dots.
> Some more extremist outliers, give us less than a decade, before crop production fails at significant volumes to cause civilisation collapse.
Any names, links come to mind? My definition of "extremist" in this case is about 20-30 years...
Re: A sign of things to come - how fast though? (Score:2)
US doesnt care about Ukrainian wheat (Score:2)
fahrenheit? (Score:1, Troll)
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How about you stop complaining about American news sites using American metrics instead?
I don't complain about the BBC using Stones in the context of human weight. Why not? Because I respect that different countries do things differently unlike you.
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Value (Score:1)
Goddamn imperial units (Score:2)
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Ministry For The Future (Score:3)
There is a good recent sci-fi near-future dystopian book that starts with exactly this kind of event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
If extreme weather events caused by climate change disproportionately affect one country over another, that country may be forced to act.
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Yep. I was thinking the same thing. I just recently read The_Ministry_for_the_Future . I would recommend the book, though I found not only the climate disasters to be dystopian, but also the end state (in the book) of the world order to be dystopian. Feel like a true scifi author could make a sequel where the inevitable results of that new world order also lead to bad consequences, not related to the natural environment ..parsing words to as not to be a spoiler
Kim Stanley Robinson called it... (Score:2)
KSR called heat waves in India in Ministry For The Future, where he actually takes a pretty realistic look at the likeliest near term future on a warming planet. Of course, his is more extreme, where a heat wave is accompanied by extreme humidity, lasts for weeks, leading to grid collapse, and with wet bulb temps above human body temperature, millions of people slowly cook alive over the course of days.
I certainly hope that's not what happens, but it starts to look like an inevitability if this keeps up.