The Day the Planet Burned, and Everybody Looked Away
Image Credit: Capitol Weather Gang on Twitter
It’s the Hottest Day in 100,000 Years — But Did Anyone Care?
by umair haque
This is going to sound mean. Sorry about that, maybe, you can be the judge, I guess.
To gain some appreciation for just how much of an idiot the average person is…where the world is…how foolish our politicians are…what plight humanity faces in the 21st century…consider the following.
We just lived through something for which historic is an understatement. Something epochal, in the literal sense of the word.
But can you guess what it was? Go ahead, take a shot. Take another one. Ready?
We just lived through the hottest day in over 100,000 years. Even that’s an understatement. Four of them in fact. And summer’s just begun.
Now imagine that we went out on the street and asked the average person about all the above. Hey, you just lived through something historic, epochal, shattering. Do you…LOL…my dude…do you even know what it was?
I’d bet dollars to donuts, or maybe macarons to megafires, that they’d have…no clue. I’d get answers like: “Taylor Swift announced a new Eras tour?!” Or maybe: “Elon Musk invented super-AI?!” Or: “They finally made wokeness against the law?! Even more!! Yay!!”
What wouldn’t happen, I can all but guarantee, and I say that because I actually do this, weirdly enough, just like this — I take Snowy to the cafe, and strangers stop to pet him, or rather he boops random people, being the friendly little curious puffy ball that he is, and being who I am, I throw in a random question here and there as we say hi — like I was saying, I can all but guarantee that maybe out of 10 people, 1 would be able to articulate…the answer.
Think about it with me. We just lived through the hottest few days in 100,000 years. What’s more…historic…than that? What happened in those 100,000 years? Humans spread across the globe. Hunter gatherers discovered agriculture. Civilization was born. Some bright spark invented the alphabet, the wheel, writing. Empires rose. Slavery began. Wars were fought. Commerce and trade began, slowly, replace to violence. Democracy ignited. The Industrial Revolution happened. Empires fell. World Wars were fought. The human story — all of it — happened.
And we are now living through times which mark the end of that chapter in history. All of it. That doesn’t mean all those things will end — don’t misunderstand me — but it does mean that we are now embarking on a new chapter in the human story.
The way to tell the story geologically is this: we just lived through the hottest days in 100,000 years. But the way to tell it civilizationally is very different, darker. And nobody noticed.
Of course, scientists did. They’re practically shouting their warnings at this point. Look at the pic above. That’s a tweet from…LOL…Washington DC’s Capitol Weather Gang. Milder mannered folks have yet to be invented, really. The Capitol Weather Gang — if you listen to their broadcasts or read their writing — are usually upbeat, cheerful, and just…do their job. Hey guys! It’s going to be a beautiful day! Make some time to enjoy it, OK — don’t work too hard!
I don’t say this disparagingly — they’re everyday meteorologists, and they do it well. More serious scientists, the academic kind? They’re tearing their hair out. Just look at tweets like these, about the strange new territory we’re in, and how worried they are, or read — as I strongly encourage you to — James Hansen’s new preprint paper with a moment where he estimates 8 to 10 degrees of warming.
When figures like this are suddenly…shouting…maybe it’s time to…listen? I add the question mark because, well…who is?
We’re living in the Age of a Great Disconnect, and that’s a polite way to put it. I called it the Triumph of the Age of the Idiot the other day, and that was in reference to the rise of far right politics around the globe — despite there not being a single example of such a thing actually leading to anything but ruin and implosion (hi, Brexit Britain, hi America.)
What do I mean by “disconnect”? We just lived through the hottest few days in over 100,000 years, an epoch that contains all of the great events of human history within it. All of them. And now look at…everything. Our economies. Politics. Societies. Culture. Do you see the faintest inkling of…anything?
I’m going to do something funny — use a little model that’s almost banal. Marketing uses a very simple way to gauge people’s insight into brands, and here, this little model serves us well. Awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation…purchase. They call this a “funnel” or “pipeline” for a reason — you have to pass through one stage to get to the next.
Let’s apply that to…LOL…the plight humanity faces, using just the issue above. I’d bet awareness of…just having lived through the hottest days in over 100,000 years is next to zero. That explains why interest in the issue is more or less nonexistent — climate change should be the world’s biggest everything, brand, celebrity, issue, topic, theme, all of it, and yet, it’s down there well below even the failed Baldwin brothers. With such little interest in it, consideration of is abysmal — which means that we never get to the “purchase” stage, which in this context would be doing something serious about it.
History is going to look at us and be baffled. They just lived through the hottest days in 100,000 years…and nobody cared? Nobody was interested? Outside of a handful of scientists and activists and a handful of well meaning people?
Think about where we are — where we really are. I know I’ve discussed this a lot, so bear with me. I think it needs to be said, strongly. Let’s go through the categories of our civilization one by one.
We’ve covered the issue socially — let me add a bit of rigor to the casual notion above. Does nobody really care about it, and I say that in the way the French say “tout le monde,” it doesn’t actually mean the literal entire world and everyone in it, it’s just shorthand.
Want to hear something bleak?
LOL — get that? Climate change was priority number 17 out of 21. As in, more or less dead last.
It’s almost comical, no? The hottest days in 100,000 years — and climate change ranks dead last. That’s not uniformly true across the globe, but it’s more or less true. Europeans are more vocal about it as an issue — but of course, they don’t act like it. Right now, they’re busy voting far right party after far right party in — hardly Green parties. (That’s not to say Green parties are the only way to solve the problem, but far right parties aren’t.) Sweden’s, taking power, proceeded to swiftly abolish the Environment Ministry. LOL. Finland’s new Economy Minister now infamously mused that the solution to climate change was…to abort African babies. Double LOL. You see my point, maybe.
Join me in deranged laugher, my friends. Nothing matters less to us than…being slowly boiled alive. Is that an inaccurate way to put it? Am I being an “alarmist”? Go ahead and look at this map of fires (static picture) in Canada and America, and tell me you feel anything but a sudden lurch of horror.
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