Yes, this is still a thing
There was snow on the ground the first time I came to England in December of 2001. I didn’t know it at the time but it was to be my first of 25 Christmases here and my last white Christmas. Our usual vision of Christmas in the south of England comes from Dickens. Back then snow was common. Today it’s practically unheard of, and might never happen again.
It’s official again, of course. The year 2024 was the hottest on record. For the last several years and probably from now on every year is going to be the hottest on record. The time of spike years is over. This is what happens when human beings are in charge.
In his message for the New Year, Secretary-General António Guterres put it this way:
“Today I can officially report that we have just endured a decade of deadly heat. The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024. This is climate breakdown — in real time. We must exit this road to ruin, and we have no time to lose.”
Throughout 2024, a series of reports from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) have highlighted the rapid pace of climate change and its far-reaching impacts on every aspect of sustainable development. The year 2024 has been a catalog of record-breaking rainfalls with resulting catastrophic flooding, scorching heat waves with temperatures exceeding 50°C (122F) and devastating wildfires.
The WMO found that climate change added 41 more days of dangerous heat in 2024.
Alarmingly, climate change was a minor issue in the 2024 election. The one time I recall Donald Trump even mentioning it was in response to a question during the presidential debate. He still confuses climate change with “clean air.” Despite the warnings and the clear evidence in front of our faces every day, climate change is rarely discussed in any political forum. When I think of human responses to this gravest of issues, I think of the shrug emoji.
Most people do not have a true appreciation of deep time. This might help to visualise it. If you think of a tape measure stretched across a football field as a timeline for the whole of Earth’s history, humans came along in the final few inches or so. Think of the Industrial Revolution as beginning in the final half inch. That’s how pitifully short a time we have been here, and that’s how quickly we managed to fuck things up.
It’s a monument to human stupidity. We have taken the most critical issues of our time, the importance of vaccinations, the inefficacy of “trickle down economic theory,” the true impact of immigration and, of course, climate change, and turned them into us versus them conspiracy theories. At what point will the human race grow up? When it’s too late? Yes, climate change is still an issue. Yes, we still have to do something about it.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.