Punjab's summer reaches the high forties in the south-west. Its winter reaches near freezing with dense fog for weeks. The range across a year is among the widest in India.
The March heatwave of 2022 arrived during wheat grain filling and cut Punjab's yield by a measurable margin across the state. Wheat needs a cool March; a hot one shrivels the grain.
That is the mechanism by which climate change reaches Punjab: not gradually, but as one bad fortnight at the wrong point in the crop cycle.
The winter fog closes the highways and the airports and is thickest over the irrigated belt, which is partly a consequence of the irrigation itself.
Breeding programmes are working on heat tolerance and earlier maturity. The window between a paddy harvest and a wheat sowing is already tight, and pushing wheat earlier collides with it.
Punjab's agriculture is calibrated to a climate that is changing faster than a breeding cycle.
May and June run past forty-five degrees in the south west and the loo blows through the afternoon. Work stops in the middle of the day and starts again toward evening.
The fog is the other extreme and it has been getting worse. December and January bring stretches of days when visibility on the Grand Trunk Road falls below fifty metres, the trains run half a day late and the flights stop, and the wheat underneath it does not mind in the slightest.
Punjab has no heat action plan of any consequence at the district level, and the outdoor workforce, in the fields, on the kilns and on construction, is who carries the risk.