Another summer and another year of record-breaking heatwaves. Headlines across the Internet talk about record high temperatures in Southern Europe, China, and across India. Death Valley in California hit 53°C recently. China broke its all time high record when it hit 52.2°C. And in Southern Europe temperatures in Spain and Italy are hitting the mid 40s. Wow, what a hot summer!
Yeah, not really.
To talk about these extreme high temperatures as simply record-breaking is disingenuous. It makes it sound like this is situation normal and that we’ll look back on the summer of 2023 and say: “It sure was hot that year!”
More likely the temperature records set this year won’t be memorable at all. Because new heat records will be set next year and the year after, and even after that.
The term “record-breaking” implies a rare event. Breaking temperature records, though, is no longer going to be a rare event, it is just going to keep happening because it’s a symptom of our warming planet – warming that we’ve caused, as everyone knows, largely through fossil fuel emissions.
The United Nation’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says extreme weather is an increasingly frequent occurrence on our planet and that climate change makes heatwaves more intense, and that means worse. The organisation adds that the world has to step up efforts to help people adapt to what is the new normal.
Talk has gone past how to stop climate change and moved on to how to live with it. And the answer to that question is: we don’t.
On a long enough time scale, the Earth cannot continue to heat up and sustain life – not life as humankind knows it, anyway. At what point does the temperature raise enough that we irrevocably break something on our planet? How do we survive if the oceans die? If the Amazon rainforest get cut down? Sadly, we don’t. Humans won’t. Other types of life would survive, but not us.
Already the WMO says there have been around two million climate-related deaths in the past half-century. Most of these are in developing countries (yes, like Malaysia – people died from heatstroke here earlier in 2023).
During Europe’s hottest summer, which was last year, and will be the previous year from now on, a study in the journal Natural Medicine states that over 61,000 people died from heat-related illness.
Keep in mind that things are only getting hotter, this doesn’t stop until we do something. So how many people will die from heat this year, and the next, and the next, and how long do we keep accepting this?
The Covid-19 pandemic showed one thing: When humanity is threatened, we will take the necessary steps to curb the threat and save lives. Countless lives were saved by shutting down the global economy and making people wear masks, and by the quick development of vaccines as pharmaceutical companies that were usually bitter rivals cooperated. Covid-19 was on track to kill even more millions of people than the six million-plus that it did if it wasn't for these actions.
Maybe humans aren’t so good when the threat has one degree of separation. People die in floods and mudslides, they die in forest fires, they die in heatwaves. All these things are made worse by climate change but because climate change isn’t written on their death certificate we shrug, shake our heads, and go on.
We need to start acknowledging the role that climate change plays in killing us. Headlines shouldn't read “61,000 die in heatwaves in Europe”. They need to read “61,000 killed by climate change”.
We need to start recognising what is killing us. Only by confronting this reality can we have any hope of making some kind of change to save our way of life.
And remember, this is the new normal. Not a planet of higher temperatures, but a planet with temperatures increasing at breakneck speed. A planet warming at a rate that the natural environment can’t keep up with, a rate that humankind can’t keep up with. Sixty-thousand dead from a season of heatwaves is bad, but if this gets worse – what happens when we get to 100,000 dead, 500,000, a million?
And this will happen, unless we start to take the climate crisis seriously. We need to get governments on board to make climate change their priority to save our planet and save us. Eventually, this decision will get made, I have no doubt – as Covid-19 showed, humans like to survive, after all. I just wonder how many more of us have to die before it happens.
Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
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