[Insert Screaming About Climate Change Here]
Into the abyss we all go!
How hot is it in Europe right now? It’s hot enough that, as you can see in the above picture, London is telling people not to travel on the Tube, which has no air conditioning on most of the lines. (London is expected to get about as hot as the Sahara over the next 24 hours, and the UK has issued its first-ever red warning for extreme heat.)
It’s hot enough that airplane runways are literally melting.
On any other occasion, the news that the British military couldn’t function would be something to cheer, but this is slightly too dystopian for that.
It’s hot enough that forests in Spain and France have gone up in flames, with tens of thousands of people evacuated from their homes as the fires spread. This is what it looked like in southwestern France today:
In France, heat records were broken and swirling hot winds complicated firefighting in the country’s southwest.
“The fire is literally exploding,” said Marc Vermeulen, the regional fire service chief who described tree trunks shattering as flames consumed them, sending burning embers into the air and further spreading the blazes.
“We’re facing extreme and exceptional circumstances,” he said.
In other words, it’s really, really, really hot, in places where it shouldn’t be so hot, and where the infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle such heat. It’s your classic climate apocalypse situation, one of those increasingly frequent moments where the earth screams at us that things are out of control.
So what are we doing about it? Oh, that’s right: nothing at all. Insert screaming here.
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