What more must it take?
It was destined to become a meme. Posing for a photo are two smiling female park rangers standing outside what looks like their visitor’s centre on either side of two giant digital readouts. The one on top says 132F. The one on the bottom says 55C. The caption reads, “This is like dinosaurs having their picture taken with an asteroid.” It would be funny if, well, you know.
I’m not sure what impulse causes some of us to play hockey with chips of ice that fell on the deck of the Titanic. Whatever it is, we’ll all have more than our share of opportunities to perform in such comedies in the coming months. It’s doubtful that many will want to do so in the coming decades, however. By then we’ll probably be far too preoccupied running for our lives. But then, I doubt a rousing game of ice hockey was on anyone’s mind when the Titanic’s main deck was at 45 degrees and climbing, either.
When I began writing about global warming I did so with the same grim sense of near disbelief that I later felt when writing about Coronavirus. I believed the science, I believed the statistics, and I wrote about both, of course. But I had no real sense that one day we really would be routinely seeing temperatures in the 120s in places I used to live, any more than I had a sense that one day more than a million Americans would die from Covid.
I wrote about both because science predicted both. But I don’t think I ever really, intuitively, grasped the inevitable truth of both. Yet both really have happened, and neither quite changed the world in the way that I would have guessed.
I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. This is how things are going to be from now on. Welcome to the new normal. It’s surreal watching people get on with their lives as things are crashing down around their ears. Maybe it’s just what humans do. After all, what else can we do?
Here in England it’s unseasonably cold. I am bundled up on my living room couch as I write this. Not a standard pose for July, even in England. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. Round the back of your refrigerator is a good place to keep warm. It’s the paradox of weather systems being played out in a climate rapidly going haywire.
Scientists have been warning us for decades that this would happen and many among us responded with the rhetorical equivalent of a laughing emoji. I used to see such irresponsible reactions to the seriousness of climate change and become furious.
Today I get no joy from having the last laugh, from knowing that Lut Desert in Iran and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican-U.S. border have recently reached a staggering 80.8°C (177.4°F). Certainly nobody enduring that would be able to laugh.
We’ve been warned for years that this would happen. But nothing prepares you for the reality of it actually happening right before your eyes. Above all, to witness these climate extremes and know that we knew it would happen and did nothing, or effectively next to nothing, remains appalling, remains infuriating. I’m speechless. I can’t imagine why anyone would think that this is a joke.
But then, after seeing two park rangers pose in front of their own epitaphs and smile makes me wonder if most of us will ever see it any other way. Many of us will go right on laughing and joking and ignoring climate change until it will no longer matter. Until it will be too late to do anything about it. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.