Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?
The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.
By Bill McKibben
We’ve crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they’re important, because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront.
Fort Good Hope, at 66.2 degrees north latitude, in Canada’s Northwest Territories (which is to say, just a few miles below the Arctic Circle), hit 99.3 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday afternoon, surpassing the old record by four degrees. The town of Norman Wells, a little to the south, topped a hundred. These are close to the high-temperature record anywhere that far north; it was hotter there over the weekend than it has ever been in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, which is twenty degrees latitude to the south. Canada was far from alone: Beijing experienced more than a week straight of temperatures higher than ninety-five degrees in a record heat wave affecting hundreds of millions of people (authorities opened air-raid shelters, some dating from the Japanese invasion in 1937, as cooling centers); temperatures were a hundred and twenty-two degrees in Kuwait and Iraq; on Thursday, Africa recorded its hottest nighttime ever, with the temperature at one site in Algeria failing to drop below 103.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Those temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world. Remember one of the essential facts of our century: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. In dry areas that leads to drought, but once that water is in the air it’s going to come down. In the past few days, we’ve seen devastating flooding and mudslides in Japan (Al Jazeera reported that the rain had brought “southwestern Japan to a halt”), China (where more than a dozen people died in seasonal mountain floods, even amid a heat wave), northern India (where bridges and buildings were washing into rivers), Spain (cars were swept away down narrow streets), and the Hudson Valley, where roads disappeared and the historic buildings at West Point are feared to have sustained damage. My neighborhood in Vermont is under a high flood-risk warning as I write this; a little to the south of us they’ve been conducting high-water rescues of stranded campers, and downtown Montpelier, the state capital, had flooded catastrophically.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-it-hot-enough-yet-for-politicians-to-take-real-action
