Climate change
The world is literally on fire – so why is it business as
usual for politicians?
Arwa Mahdawi
Our extreme weather is making me nostalgic for the damp
conditions of my English childhood. But despite the climate emergency,
capitalism continues regardless
Tue 23 Jul 2019 12.56 BST Last modified on Tue 23 Jul 2019
18.25 BST
Wildfires, such as this one in the Irkutsk region of Russia,
are common in the northern hemisphere in summer, but this year have been
further north and unusually intense. Photograph: Kirill Shipitsin/TASS
Do you remember when the weather was a reliable source of
innocuous small talk? “Hot today, isn’t it?” you would observe to a colleague
as you stood awkwardly in the lift together. They would reply with something
about the garden needing rain, then you would go back to ignoring each other.
Talking about the weather was uncontroversial. It was safe. It was oddly
soothing.
Sadly, there is nothing soothing about the weather any more;
every day seems to bring new record-breaking temperatures or extreme
conditions. June was the hottest month recorded on Earth; July is on course to
break that record. The Arctic is having a sweltering summer that has sparked
unprecedented wildfires. According to the World Meteorological Organization,
these fires emitted as much carbon dioxide in one month as the whole of Sweden
does in a year.
As large sections of the Arctic burn, major cities sizzle.
New York, where I live, has just emerged from a heatwave that the mayor
declared a “local emergency”. The city’s infrastructure, which is held together
by chewing gum and rat droppings at the best of times, buckled under the strain
of millions of heaving air conditioners, leaving more than 46,000 New Yorkers
without power on Sunday. Now it is Europe’s turn to swelter; the Met Office
says temperatures could reach 37C (99F) in London on Thursday.
What makes this extreme weather even more uncomfortable is
the grim realisation that we have done this to ourselves. The climate crisis
has made heatwaves the new normal. You can’t turn to a colleague and remark:
“Hot, isn’t it?” without thinking about the fact that, unless something drastic
is done, it is going to get hotter and hotter. According to scientists at the
Crowther Lab in Switzerland, nearly 80% of cities will undergo dramatic climate
changes by 2050; London, for example, will feel like Barcelona does today.
Residents of cities such as Jakarta and Singapore, meanwhile, will experience
“unprecedented climate conditions” characterised by extreme rainfall and severe
droughts.
As the implications of the climate crisis become impossible
to ignore, many of us are growing increasingly terrified. The climate emergency
isn’t just damaging the planet; it is also harming our mental health – a
phenomenon called “eco-anxiety”. As Alexandria Harris wrote in her 2015 book
Weatherland, “small alterations in familiar places can disturb us more than
dystopian visions”. I spent every summer of my childhood shivering on damp
Cornish beaches and can’t quite wrap my head around England’s heatwaves. I feel
a sense of bereavement for an England that seems to be disappearing; on a
climate level, the place I grew up in is starting to feel like a different
country. Indeed, Harris said in her book that “the years to come … may be the
last years of English weather”. Now is the time, she says, to build a “great
storehouse” of weather memories.
We are going to need a lot more than a storehouse of
memories to weather what is coming, of course. We need to significantly change
our behaviour and, even more importantly, overhaul our economic system. After
all, only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. You know
all this already; we all do. But our politicians still are not taking
meaningful action. Capitalism is carrying on with business as usual. The world
is literally on fire – and it feels as though we are fiddling with paper straws
while it burns.
•Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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