The unprecedented June heatwave in Europe has broken all June temperature records in country after country and so far caused an estimated 10,000 excess deaths as the extreme heat sweeps across the continent. Even more extreme heatwaves are now predicted to arrive in July and August, killing thousands more and making life hellish for millions.
Wales experienced its hottest ever June day with a temperature of 35.6C in Bute Park, Cardiff, topping the previous highest June temperature in Wales of 33.7C recorded in Powys in 2000. There were even higher day-time temperatures above 38C recorded in southern England while Cardiff had the dubious honour of setting a new all-time UK record for overnight temperature of 23.5C on June 24th.
What was most frightening was the extraordinary humidity that made the heat especially unbearable, almost reaching the maximum possible humidity level of 100 hitherto only found in equatorial tropical forests. In the terraced street in inner-city Cardiff where I live there was no escape from the oppressive sweltering and even when temperatures somewhat abated last weekend the humidity continued indoors because the sandstone exterior walls had absorbed the heat to such an extent that the house had become a sauna. It has taken days for the building to cool down slightly. But no buildings in the UK were built for this sort of climate – for instance, people I know who live in Cardiff’s ever-increasing array of concrete and glass tower blocks tell me the heat rendered their flats virtually impossible to live in.
This is merely one more example of the impact a rapidly heating planet is having, not just here but everywhere. Greenland’s frozen tundra is alight, Switzerland’s few remaining Alpine glaciers have melted, Antarctic ice-sheets and Arctic sea-ice are disappearing, wildfires gallop through Australia, North America and the Mediterranean nations, sea-levels rise inexorably, each successive year becomes the hottest on record, floods and droughts plague Asia, coral reefs and forests are dying, hurricanes are getting ever more destructive…and on and on…and this doesn’t even touch on the collapse of ecosystems and the natural world caused by pollution, overpopulation, over-development, over-consumption, endless growth and general human intervention.
And still, despite half a century of warnings from ecologists, meteorologists, climatologists, physicians, biologists, geologists, botanists and every reputable scientist not in the pockets of the fossil fuel industries, nothing whatsoever has been done to tackle and reverse this ever-accelerating catastrophe. Turbo-capitalist multi-millionaires, fascist demagogues, armageddon nut-cases, and the plain stupidity, laziness, short-termism, greed and nihilism of cowardly politicians and their ignorant masses have been allowed to set the agenda and ensure nothing is done to stop the insanity.
In the UK, a broad acceptance had gradually accrued across the political spectrum that urgent action was needed to save our one and only planet. But the rise of the far-right in the last ten years, enabled by the propaganda onslaught of misinformation from the USA’s giant tech corporations and the brute barbarism of Trump, has smashed that consensus. The scoffing contempt and systemic denialism of destructive con-men like Farage has spread to Badenoch’s criminal Conservative party with the help of the far-right media barons and, not helped by the timid pussy-footing of Starmer’s rightwing Labour party, the future existence of Earth has, ridiculously, been turned into a left/right issue – as if it were in anyone interests to bring about an uninhabitable planet!
As matters go beyond irreversible tipping points there is no escaping the fact that the problem is invidious, venal, arrogant, over-rated, under-educated, pointless humanity that brazenly, knowingly and deliberately acts against the interests of all life. What will it take to force human beings to deal with this most difficult truth of all?