For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this for very severe storms in the past. Today, we have it for heat. In Utrecht, it’s right now 37 degrees Celsius, but due to high humidity levels, it feels like 40. In the South-East of the Netherlands, temperatures are around 39 degrees, hence feel-like temperatures well over 40. And the reporting we saw from London and Paris looked even worse.
The weather presenters here have done a good job in explaining the relation to climate change. Some right-wing politicians keep downplaying these explanations, saying we should enjoy the lovely weather with a cool beer by the pool, but I think reality is hitting too hard for that kind of ideological nonsense to have much influence very longer.
One friend sent me a message saying that he has started to suffer from climate anxiety; if this is the beginning [for us!], where will it end?
I’m trying to remain hopeful, and am hoping (and pleading) that this experience will make more people realise that we need to massively step up our efforts on climate action. We need to scale up climate change adaptation immediately to protect those most at risk of the harms of climate change. Most of those people are not in Europe but in the Global South, and given a widespread lack of care of what happens to people in poor countries, I’m more worried about them (and have been wondering for a long time how we can make the biggest emitters – which in fact are not Europeans but Americans, Canadians, and others – care about the effects on the most vulnerable in the Global South. Let me know if you know, because I don’t.)
But we must also redouble our efforts on climate mitigation. Some people are still trying to downplay the need for this. I saw a Dutch commentator on social media say that even if we were to put out all the fires today, the world would still get warmer. Yes, that’s true, but it’s also beside the point. If we carry on as we currently do, the world will warm up much more and we will suffer far more serious harms from climate change than if we step up our climate mitigation efforts. It is the choice we face between a slightly warmer world and a much warmer world with far more unpredictable weather and other climate risks.
All of this reminded me of the The Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s unrivalled science fiction novel, which anyone who hasn’t read yet really ought to read. In that novel, after the situation had deteriorated to unimaginable extremes, humanity – with a little help from climate rebels – finally found the courage and the political strategies to tackle the climate crisis. A great deal of political action and persuasion is still needed on numerous fronts, but we can only hope that the current heatwave in Europe will make a contribution to turn the situation around for the better.
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