Hot Planet Summer

July has begun, and I am sprawled on the parched grass. Twenty four years old, still young and somewhat a rosebud, wanting to bloom in the mild climate that I have always known. The world feels hot. Our house does not have air conditioning – nobody here thought that would ever be needed. So I rely on the scraggly pine trees for some humble respite from the oddly generous midday sun.

I say that the sun feels oddly generous and something does feels strange and unseasonable – you want to believe that the hot plasma simply wants to emit more energy today, resulting in an unbelievable summer day up here. But that would of course not be the case – we are boiling here because we are cooped up inside an atmosphere filled with too many greenhouse gases.

Never have I been so warm and sweaty wearing my linen dress – the billowy one that would move gently with the wind that you wish would come – so near the arctic circle. But an eeriness has latched itself onto the land here, and around me there are drooping roses and sapless heather near my freckled nose and an ominous dryness everywhere you look, coupled with silence because the children of the neighbourhood are being kept in the shade. Even air for breathing feels different – too warm and silky smooth through my nostrils.

Though I could be imagining that. Today feels somewhat removed from reality and reason. Heatwaves have people feel dazed and sometimes apparently pleasantly so. In the garden to my right the neighbour soaks up sun with satisfaction. He looks cool wearing those sunglasses – slick and untroubled and as cool as middle-aged men can look. Across the other fence I see another neighbour who looks engrossed in her novel whilst sipping on an icy drink with delight. I realise that I am not really reading but merely turning the pages in my paperback slowly and absently – likely even indifferently – because of my uneasy mind. Here the heat almost feels luxurious – but all my thoughts and feelings are obsessed with how ominous the warmth today could be.

Every day there has been bad news about the planet. The narratives of May and June have been shaped by dangerous consequences from unbridled carbon indulgence now striking everything between California and China. The science has been reported so much that I could repeat it in my sleep. Too big an increase in greenhouse gas emissions leads to more warmth, and more warmth leads to droughts and fires and expanding deserts and flash floods and heavy rains. Young Bangladeshi children become afraid of water and citizens across western United States are learning to live with “fire weather” and European wildfires turn the sky orange and red. The hottest news on our planet.

Sometimes those extreme weather events can be forecast – like the unprecedented heatwave that struck England – and sometimes they cannot be anything other than cruelly unpredictable. On an ordinary day hikers looked up and saw an avalanche coming towards them –unleashed from an Italian glacier melting during abnormally high temperatures.

Whether you survive the next decade and century seems dependent on luck. Either from being placed somewhere far north where the heat not yet gets so bad. Or from happening to be somewhere the hurricane never reached – that particular time.

Maybe I should feel lucky today, maybe even attempt to muster some enjoyment from the warmth. Summers here used to be cooler and soaked in rain, or so I seem to remember. Everybody wanted vacations in the southern Mediterranean countries. The summers from before involved emerging from chilly lake water with shivers and goosebumps and spending time on board games as rain halted fierce Kubb playing. When the evening sun you usually went to fetch woollen jumpers for the outdoors. Italy and Greece seemed like dreams but those places seem too hot now. My neighbours and many others must be reveling in the sun today – the Mediterranean brought northwards – but I am not the sunbathing type.

I abandon my paperback on the blanket even though the sun feels hot enough for the printed black letters to melt away and slip off the pages. I am too distracted to really care, and head towards the shaded woods, my haven for contemplation. The path I walk on stays empty but I see people dozing in hammocks under the thirsty trees and like I envied my neighbours I envy their placidness – my own thoughts more keen on ranting about everything to only an audience of fallen pine needles and thirsty mosses.

I am worrying about the unseasonable heat. Kids and young adults do across the planet. Maybe not because we worry about hyperthermia and our health as eldery people might. But because the heat signals the arrival of personal futures different than the ones we had imagined. Our limbic systems are registering environmental change. We expected society and culture to change – we are the generation growing up alongside rapidly developing technology – but not the planet and the great glaciers and the lush rainforests and the vast oceans. And the summer temperatures.

We try to inform ourselves and live by our values as best we can – conscious and alert – but small are our tiny ripples in the mighty seas of oil, gas, and coal. I envy older generations for the time they had and feel betrayed because I wanted to be cool too – literally and figuratively – rfeeling free and untroubled. Not worrying about climate breakdown materialising two generations down the line. But we are having a hot planet summer.

When September comes the strong sun dwindles, and my world cools down as the heat subdues. The soft rains that fall feel like calm falling down on the ground, and I long for snow now, eager to have winters as I knew them.

I keep tabs on climate legislation and green technology developments and setbacks and anticipate what the next summer will bring – probably even worse heat. Carbon would linger behind should even all emissions drop to zero in an instant. More hot planet summers to come.