Monsoon clouds gather in India. PlaneMad

In India, extreme weather basically means the annual monsoon, and this season’s rains, which ended a few weeks ago, were a constant topic of conversation during the five days I’ve just spent traveling around the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. U.P., as people call it here, is one of the poorest states in the nation, as well as the largest (with 200 million people, it has more people than Brazil -- but squashed into 94,000 square miles, just 3 percent of the land area).

A new IPCC report on extreme weather events and climate change, published today, reflects the almost unanimous view of scientists that we face a future of hotter temperatures, stronger storms, heavier rainfall, and worse droughts. (See my interview with IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.) No single event can be predicted with certainty, and it’s especially difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions about the South Asian monsoon. Climate modelers find the monsoon a notoriously difficult challenge, since its onset, length, and intensity depend on so many factors: ocean surface temperatures, winds, the interaction between land and ocean conditions, snow cover in the Himalayas, the influence of the so-called El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and so on.

In any given year, the impact of the monsoon can also vary a lot from place to place, and much of the evidence is necessarily anecdotal. In some areas of U.P., people told me, this year’s rains had been about average. In others, they had gone on much longer than usual. In others, the rainfall had been uncommonly heavy, while the previous year’s monsoon had been brutally dry. These variations are pretty typical. But on the broader picture there was little dispute. "There’s no doubt that the summer season has become longer and hotter," I was told by an agricultural expert in the town of Allahabad. "It used to be six months; now it’s eight, eight-and-a-half. And the winters are colder. Last year it went down to 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit), which is unheard of."

Farmers in U.P. live or die by their crops of rice and wheat -- which means they live or die by the weather. In the village of Kanethi, women in bright saris were out in the fields threshing a late-planted variety of rice. In a nearby assembly hall, one farmer complained that he had lost 10 percent of his crop this year to a disease that blackens the grains and makes them bitter. Another said his paddy leaves had turned yellow, and he was only just able to save his crops with a timely barrage of pesticides. Another said that the blight that hit his fields was worse than he had ever experienced. When he put the blame on climate change, everyone in the room nodded vigorously in agreement.

The most wrenching post-monsoon stories came in the district of Gorakhpur, a grimy, chaotic town about 130 miles north of the Ganges and the spiritual center of Varanasi. I had been warned to think twice about visiting the area, because an epidemic of encephalitis had been raging since mid-July. It’s a particularly hideous disease -- Indians call it "brain fever" -- and it mainly affects small children from the "scheduled castes," the poorest of the poor. Gorakhpur is regularly afflicted; in fact, it was here that Japanese encephalitis, the mosquito-borne variant of the disease, was first documented in the 1970s. The more standing water, the more mosquitoes, the more encephalitis. There were pockets of very severe flooding around Gorakhpur, and five weeks after the rains ended, there were still large areas of inundated land -- and the dying continued.

One of the most important parts of the new IPCC report on extreme weather is its analysis of how governments can respond to the human consequences of events like an abnormally heavy monsoon. Do they have enough information to make accurate predictions? Are they doing enough to educate people about ways of adapting to changing conditions? Do they have the material resources and institutional competence they need? Above all, perhaps, do they have the necessary political will?

In Gorakhpur, it seemed, the answer was "none of the above." On a traffic island in the center of town, under a statue of Gandhi holding an umbrella, I met a local NGO leader named Jatashanker, who was leading a week-long sitdown protest at the government’s inaction in the face of the encephalitis epidemic. No one really knows how many have died this year, he told me. The official number is over 500, but most of the reporting comes from the central hospital in Gorakhpur. Out in the remote villages, who could say?

The government had said that all the local community health centers were stocked with vaccines and could handle the situation, but that was laughable. Jatashanker pulled out his iPhone, incongruous amid the chaos of rickshaws, motorbikes, and wandering water buffalo, and showed me a photograph of four infants sharing a single bed in the Gorakhpur hospital. Had they all died? I asked. He didn’t know. But if they survived, they would have permanent brain damage.

I asked Jatashanker what he thought the government should do. Three things, he said: declare a national disaster, build a new 400-bed hospital to deal with future outbreaks, and fund a scientific research center to learn more about the dreaded disease and how its severity related to the rains. I assume the doctors must be helping you press your case, I said. "Gorakhpur doctors are a very careless body," he said wearily. "They just say, we have no powers, we can’t make any recommendations."

You hear this kind of complaint a lot in U.P. Even by India’s dismal standards, the state government is notoriously slothful and corrupt, and the medical profession is deeply implicated in the rampant graft. Just two days ago, the local press carried fresh news of the investigation into the recent murders of three senior government health officials in the state capital, Lucknow. Were they personally involved in the corruption? Was one of them about to name names? In U.P., these things are hard to know.

On the afternoon of my visit to Jatashanker’s protest, I went out to Jungle Deerdhan Singh, a village near Gorakhpur, where a four-year-old had succumbed to encephalitis in September. Could his death be ascribed to climate change? Could the bitter grains of rice in Kanethi? As the new IPCC report says, it’s impossible to link any single weather event or its consequences to climate change. But the pattern is clear: in our warming future, more children will die, more rice grains will turn bitter, and the places worst afflicted will need something better than the government of Uttar Pradesh to protect them.