el monzón es cocide. - Thoughts

For those of you who can't read Spanish: It says "The monsoon is cooked".  

You read that right. Those of you in India would've noticed that even though it's JUNE, the FIRST RAINY MONTH, there's barely a cloud in the sky. Wispy cirruses and small cumuli bring little promise of rain. 

But how did this happen? 

Short answer? We set fire to fossil photosynthesisers and fracked ourselves up with millions of years of carbon set free. To quote Coldplay, "the tightrope that [we're] walking just sways and ties". 

Long answer? 

It's because we've made The Boy a lot more powerful, so now he's ruining our monsoon. 

Who's "The Boy", you ask? 

¡El Niño! 

Its full name's the El Niño Southern Oscillation, but I'll be calling it ENSO in this article. Basically, ENSO is a boy some years and a girl (La Niña) on others. For example, 2025 (last year) had a few La Niña events, and the La Niña stent from 2020 to 2023 made the news. 

Most of the time, the West Pacific is warmer than the East. But when ENSO has an El Niño, the Western Pacific cools and the Eastern Pacific warms. This upsets the weather pretty severely; India (actually, much of mainland South and Southeast Asia) heats up and most of Southeast Asia dries. 

This already sounds scary. But it's actually an important part of the Holocene world. Hooray! However, like the rest of the Holocene, anthropogenic climate change (that thing we're doing when we release dangerous amounts of heat-trapping gases into the air and they stop heat from leaving into space) is leaning dangerously on this chair we rely on. ENSO was pretty reliant on the old concentrations of greenhouse gases. So who knows? Maybe, as I fear, ENSO will decide it's a boy for good and keep heating and drying southern Asia and that one part of Alaska that robs Yukon and British Columbia of their coastlines. 

Why is this bad for the monsoon? Well, as El Niño, ENSO heats both land and sea alike. And the sea's already pretty hot; it's a WHOLE DEGREE CELSIUS ABOVE WHAT IT USED TO BE BEFORE WE STARTED BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. Doesn't sound so bad... until you realise how temperature-sensitive corals are. And also, when India heats up, cold, wet sea air is supposed to come to the rescue and start the monsoon. However, the sea's just as hot as the land, so not much airflow expected here either. Heck, ENSO made 2024 the hottest year on record, so I'm pretty sure 2026 has a slot reserved for it in the Guinness Book of World Records! 

So what does anyone do about it? 

I say we increase green cover in cities. With native, resource-light plants, of course. And set up roofs everywhere. I'm not going to ask you to switch off your AC, because you're probably reliant on it for a clear head. Though you should do your part to help fund rooftop solar incentives. If you're wondering why this advice is so vague... 

I don't know what else we can do about ENSO being an El Niño in a warming world! Unless you're Avatar Aang or someone else capable of controlling the global climate with a flick of your hand, there's not much you can do! 

Hang in there, guys. Humans have adapted to a lot before, and we'll get through this. 

Sorry for ending on a low-ish note. 

-Pied 

(P.S.: The thumbnail is a Pied Cuckoo, known in India as a chātaka. Legend has it that it drinks only raindrops, thus waiting for rain to drink. In real life, it migrates here from Africa around the same time as the monsoons in order to eat a lot of insects. I drew this one irritated because the rains are delayed. Myth or fact, the bird would be mad either way.) 

UPDATE: As of the 6th of June, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh finally got their monsoons! :D