¿Qué Calor?

It's getting warm along the Camino a Ítaca. Successive heatwaves have already struck here in Spain and it's not even July yet. Click over to read the originally published piece in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo en castellano) 

It’s well past the cuarenta de mayo (fortieth of May) and while I might not be seeing sayos (cloak) out on the streets, this week I have seen the reappearance of a few winter coats. Full disclosure, I’m not sure that I would be able to identify a sayo if I was confronted with one, but the brusque change in the weather has meant that some have dug out their winter apparel.

It's almost hard to believe that just over a week ago we were sweating our way through this year’s second heatwave, even if the first in May wasn’t technically classified assuch. Whatever the case, this past heat event was one of the earliest on record. As temperatures remained above 25º throughout the darkest hours of the night, many of us chose to ignore the vertiginously high price of electricity to manage a few hours of sleep under the whirling blades of a fan or, somewhat more luxuriously, be lulled to sleep by the hum of an air conditioning unit.

Now that school is over, we quickly forget that our kids had to leave school early that week because the temperatures in the classrooms were more apt for reheating food than revealing the methodological mysteries of ‘la copia’ (where kids are asked to copy out long texts from books into their notebooks).

Yes, we quickly forget. That is until the next one comes around and this summer holds promise.

Albert Einstein is said to have stated that memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events. We are so sure that our memories accurately reflect our past, that what we don’t realize is that what we remember is also a reflection of our current situation, beliefs and values.

In other words, yeah I remember it being hot last week, but now that there is a chill in the air, it wasn’t so bad, was it?

It was. And it’s only going to get worse.

Climate change is no longer a question of if it’s going to happen. It already has. What we don’t know is how bad it will eventually get. These are simple facts that only religious fundamentalists and the overtly greedy choose to overlook. The former because they believe in a celestial dictator who controls everything no matter what we do, while the latter is more worried about their bottom line and have a false sense of security that their money will buy them safety when the water wars begin.

But what about our elected governments? The right seems to want to delude itself believing that the free market will somehow find a solution. The left opts for conning individual consumers into thinking that conscientious recycling and eating less meat will magically lower Chinese and American emissions.

By stating this doesn’t mean that individual steps shouldn’t be taken, but they will not result in drastic changes. What needs to be done is to act now to palliate the effects and prepare ourselves for the successive heatwaves, droughts and wildfires to come. Greening our economy is necessary, but in addition practical steps need to be taken to ready us for the extreme weather events to come. This may turn out to be the hottest summer of our lives, but in the future it may turn out to be the coldest that you remember.