Despite the dismissive words on social media which claim that the heat we’re experiencing is normal Europe’s fifth heat wave isn’t ‘just weather’.
We are living in an age where charletons in union jack socks with connections to the oil and gas industry dismiss net zero targets, despite the repeated warnings from actual experts. When a heat wave hits once during the summer, it could be considered an anomaly. When Europe braces for its fifth major heat wave of a single summer, dismissing it as routine weather is naïve and dangerous. Temperatures topping 40°C across the continent are no longer extreme blips, rather they represent baseline of a rapidly shifting climate system. People may recount how the climate has changed before, like the change from the ice age to the world as we know it- a shift which happened over tens of thousands of years. This story is a comforting notion for some but simply disguises the fact that the Earth has never experienced climate change caused by one species like it has over the past 200 years.
Calling these events ‘just weather’ shifts focus away from systemic human causes onto natural variability. We ignore the reality that fossil-fuel emissions have fundamentally altered atmospheric dynamics, the effect of which we are already witnessing.
Until we stop treating recurring climate emergencies like unexpected summer heat, and change our ways accordingly, we remain unprepared and partially responsible for the climate crisis we are witnessing.