S.L. Kletz

On inhabiting a warming planet we’re scared to admit is getting worse.

Ask me my favorite season and I’ll tell you it’s split equally between spring and fall. Spring for its pastel hues and returning joy after the darkness of winter. Fall for the cozy traditions and relief from the heat of summer.

I’m not particularly partial towards the heat or cold. I’m a northerner at heart, but I’ve lived in the south for over half my life (I guess I can’t keep defending a Yankee identity even though the culture shock hasn’t entirely worn off after all this time). This year, I’d been craving the summer after a particularly cold Tennessee winter, but I took it back immediately after watching everything around me start to melt.

At a 4^th of July pool party this year, the planning committee put up a balloon arch and dealt out hot dogs to celebrate the U.S.’s 250th. Someone’s playlist rattled on a way-too-loud speaker, blaring “Party in the USA” and John Denver. Loud pops intermittently caught the attention of everyone in the pool, but it wasn’t champagne bottles or bullets. Instead it was the sound of the balloons popping one by one until the arch remained a pathetic string of wrinkly and deflated red, white, and blue latex — unable to withstand the triple digit heat.

At my job as an early childhood educator, the soundtrack to my summer playground supervision consists solely of children crying, “I’m too hottttt!” The kids learn that sweat burns when it runs into their eyes and how to tell when something is in the sun or the shade. They frequently come sit by me on the sidewalk, putting their playtime on hold because they are simply too hot to continue on.

If it feels like it is over 95F degrees, we are not permitted to take them outside. I don’t always check the temps – sometimes you open the door and know when its too hot. Some days feel manageable compared to the days when it feels like the world is an oven and we’re all just unconsenting cookies baking inside. So on the days it is nice enough to take them outside, I recoil in shock when my supervisor comes to tell me to take them back inside because it’s over 100F degrees out. I would have had no clue.

There is a psychological phenomenon known as the contrast effect, where we perceive something to be either magnified or diminished when presented alongside another stimuli at a particular extreme (in kindergarten words: something bad makes what’s next to it look good, something good makes what’s next to it look bad). It is often employed in political strategies and marketing schemes. If what you are selling an audience may not mull over well on its own, present it alongside an extreme, and see how easily the initial option becomes preferable. When it comes to our warming climate, a 95F degree day feels preferable to the days at 105F, yet both are unacceptable at the rate they are persisting across our summers and into other seasons.

Our denial that things are changing persists because it relies on gradual adjustment and our imperfect memory. We can acknowledge how hot it is, but we cannot accurately remember the temperature patterns from when we were children. Because the days we lived a long time ago are now only figures in a chart, it is easier to brush off how drastic and dangerous the increasing temperature is.

What future is there for the children spending their summers indoors because it is too dangerous for them to play outside? And not because of reckless drivers or perverts trying to kidnap them. Even in a fenced-in backyard, monitored under the watchful eyes of an adult, a child can still develop heat stroke.

The earth our children know is one that is roasting, and they don’t know any better as the adults simply adjust to the rising temperatures. We are quite literally the frogs in the boiling pot metaphor.

It is unlikely everyone is going to keel over dead due to climate change in our lifetimes, but that does not mean many people won’t die and that people already haven’t died yet due to extreme weather, disasters, famine, and disease. 25,000 people have died this summer due to the heatwaves in Europe, and an estimated 489,000 people die globally each year due to extreme heat. Developed countries have an infrastructural advantage and the blind eye to spare them from having to acknowledge things like the deaths due to famine in Sudan and rising climate displacement in South Asia.

The humans with the privilege to adapt will adapt. We’ll bake outside, forgetting it wasn’t that long ago when we thought 90 degrees was hot. But as each summer we face breaks records, at what point will it be enough to convince us that the effects of global warming are not this far-off, distant disaster looming in the future, but instead a present crisis displaying its extremes now as a preview to just how much worse it is going to get?

May I remind you we’re closer to all of those empty 2030 corporate climate initiative promises than we are to the COVID pandemic, and that global warming is affecting you presently more than just the weather. It’s stealing from your wallet — driving up the cost of goods and insurance and energy bills; worsening the air quality which contributes to 7.9 million premature deaths worldwide each year; lengthening allergy season (it feels, like, basically all year round now); and spreading disease by expanding the territories pests like ticks and mosquitoes can survive in.

What will have to happen to you for you to acknowledge it’s here? Will you have to lose everything in a natural disaster, like the 375,000 households displaced from Hurricane Helene? Will you have to develop Lyme disease from a tick bite you got on a hike? Will the produce section at your local grocery store have to be stocked with nothing but rot? Will your skin have to sear and melt off your flesh for you to say with your chest, “Global warming is real and it’s now“?

The truth is, if you are still not sure you’re ready to say that this is your reality, you do need to ask yourself the question: what will it take? How bad does it need to get? How badly does it need to affect me to take this seriously? And even if it does affect me, what will I do to try to mitigate it?

What I advise, my friend, is to make the changes now. In your habits and your votes. In your long-term goals and your emergency plans. In the way you conceptualize the world. Because you are not promised the chance of tomorrow to begin thinking about it. The people in North Carolina didn’t know their world would be swept off their feet by the floods. The people in Europe didn’t think they could succumb to the heat. The people in Sudan didn’t ask to be born into crisis and famine.

So, before the floods and the hunger and the disease and the heat come for you, it would probably be best to at least say: this is real and something must be done.