The Long Emergency: It is upon us

Obviously it's been hard to get people worried about consequences that may ensue in the year 2100. Unfortunately much of the public communication about climate change has been about the considerably distant future. When people build their houses in places they know are prone to wildfires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions they probably aren't thinking about heatwaves and droughts 30 years from now.

Scientists were reluctant to talk about the possibility of very near-term effects of climate change because they didn't have a high degree of certainty about them, and in fact they have been somewhat taken by surprise. But it's time to get real folks. We aren't just worried about 2100, or 2050, or even 2030. We're worried about now.

The European heat wave has gotten surprisingly little attention here, and in fact I've been surprised how little it seems to interest the editors of The Guardian. England was spared the worst of it, but the continent got oven roasted.

The highest temperature ever measured across France in the entirety of record keeping was set on Friday afternoon. Temperatures soared to 45.9 C (114.6 F) at Gallargues-le-Montueux in southeastern France, exceeding the nation's previous all-time record high of 44.1 C (111.4 F) at Conqueyrac on 12 August 2003.

Note that the previous record was set in August. This was June.

A total of 137 stations out of 150 with at least 30 years of data set daily record highs on Wednesday in the Czech Republic. Out of those stations, 41 broke June records for their individual locations. More than half of the stations in Switzerland recorded new all-time June temperatures on Wednesday.
The average temperature across all of France was 27.9 C (82.2 F) on Thursday, the highest value recorded in all of June. In Spain, Madrid was among the locations that recorded all-time June temperatures across the nation on Friday. All weather reporting stations across the Spanish province of Castellón except one endured their hottest June day on record amid this heat wave.

Heat waves can be among the most deadly of natural disasters, but they attract much less notice than storms or earthquakes or wildfires. There isn't any good video, for one thing. While this high temperature excursion in Europe will only be a few days long, places nearer the equator are already getting close to becoming uninhabitable.  When heat waves  continue, and especially when the temperature remains high at night, the human body loses the ability to regulate temperature. We can take it for a day or two, but then we start to get heat exhaustion and heatstroke. Then we die.

This will continue to exacerbate the global crisis of displacement, and eventually will have catastrophic economic impact. The only way to slow it down is to stop burning fossil fuel.