Earlier this week, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union-funded research group, announced that last Sunday, July 21, 2024, the daily global average temperature hit 62.76 degrees. It was the hottest day scientists have measured since 1940 — which officially makes it the hottest day ever recorded on Earth by humans. Twenty four hours later, however, Copernicus had to update its report: On Monday, the temperature climbed up to 62.87 degrees. As of now, July 22, 2024 is now the hottest day ever recorded.
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But hey, it’s only Friday. Who knows what the weekend holds? Or the rest of the summer, for that matter.
Are you shocked by news of this record-breaking heat? Does the fact that you lived through two of the hottest days on Earth that scientists have ever recorded make you think differently about the risks and consequences of living on a rapidly-warming planet? Did you pause for a moment and think about the millions of people who sweat through this without air conditioning? Did you mourn the 396 deaths from heat that are under investigation this summer in Phoenix? Did you sell your car and buy an electric bike? Were you inspired to sign up to knock on doors to help Kamala Harris defeat the climate-hoax-pushing-criminal Donald Trump? Are you getting calls from your MAGA-loving uncle in Idaho apologizing for the long lecture he gave you at Thanksgiving last year about how Earth’s temperature moves in natural cycles, or about how higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is good because more CO2 makes crops and trees grow better?
Probably not.
The problem is not you. The problem is that a broken heat record is just another statistic. The story of the climate crisis is written in broken records that measure levels of CO2 pollution, glacial ice melt, rising sea levels, crop failure, megafires, the spread of diseases, heat deaths, wildfire and insurance costs, and economic losses. But if shocking data and broken records could galvanize people to take action on climate, we’d all be powering our iPhones with solar power from microgrids, and millions of cows and chickens would be liberated from factory farms. We’d have cities crowded with bike lanes and a high speed rail service between Dallas and Houston. We’d laugh at climate-hoaxing politicians and debate whether it is fair and just to charge Big Oil companies with criminally negligent homicide.
But that hasn’t happened. Or it’s not happening fast enough. Why? Well, I’m a journalist, not a political scientist, psychologist, or expert in social activism (for more about that, check out Dana Fisher’s new book Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action ).
But for what it’s worth, here’s how I’d explain it.
First, nobody cares about numbers. They care about stories. They care about emotion. They care about life, death, hope, dreams. And money. A heat statistic is not a visceral thing. It is a data point. And thanks to years of strategic targeting of trusted media and scientific institutions by far-right autocrats everywhere, we live in a world that increasingly distrusts data points. Where is the line between fake news and fake data? On social media platforms, it’s easy to find climate deniers claiming that temperature monitoring stations are all located in hot places on airport runways or in sun-baked parking lots, suggesting that there is some grand conspiracy to crank up the temperature readings so that George Soros can control the world and force you to sell your jacked-up 4-wheeler and grill crickets instead of hamburgers at your next summer BBQ.
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One of the reasons I titled my book The Heat Will Kill You First is that I wanted to transform heat into a visceral thing. I wanted to tell readers a story about what happens inside the human body during a heatstroke. How heat cells melts and proteins unravel. And how it is not just old ladies with heart conditions or migrant farmworkers who heat kills. It can happen to you, if you are stuck in the wrong place or make a miscalculation on a hot day.
The second problem with record-breaking statistics has to do with shifting baselines. For anyone who is half-awake, the idea of climate crisis is not new. It’s baked into our thinking about the world we live in. It’s hard to jolt anyone out of that, especially with a statistic or a headline.
But an even bigger threat is the way we habituate to climate chaos. Instead of being shocked by a brutal heat dome, or a devastating wildfire, we just accept that is what world is like now. I live in Austin, which had 42 days last summer above 105 degrees. It was shocking and brutal. But the response from many Texans was, “Yeah, it’s always hot in Texas.” No statistic was going to change their view about that. People come to believe that that heat waves that cook cities are just the way that nature works. In some ways, this is the dark side of climate adaptation. We adapt by learning to live with it. Air pollution from fossil fuels kills about five million people every year. But those deaths are largely (and tragically) background noise. It has just become part of life in the 21st century.
A similar thing is happening with the climate crisis. Floods, megafires, heat domes — it will all become just a part of the way the world works now. Not only do we lose our outrage. But we lose any sense that this climate chaos is an entirely human artifact, a real as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
And finally, it’s time to admit that for the rising tide of autocrats around the world, climate chaos is a feature, not a bug. Trump’s ascendency depends on chaos. It gives him a reason to build more walls, lock up more migrants, and suck up more money from Big Oil. For Trump and his autocratic pals, this is a no brainer. Solving climate change is like setting a throttle limit on the engine that drives your voters to the polls.
All this is not to say that living through two of the hottest days in recorded human history is not a big deal. It is. These are dangerous times, and not just because democracy is on the ballot in November. The very stability of the climate that gives us life is also on the line.
What is needed most right now is not a “solution” for the climate crisis, but the courage for a long fight. As Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, one of the founders of Earth Day, put it more than 50 years ago: “The battle to restore a proper relationship between man and his environment, and between man and other living creatures, will require a long, sustained political, moral, ethical, and financial commitment far beyond any commitment made by any society in this history of man. Are we able? Yes. Are we willing?That’s the unanswered question.”
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