Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Der schönen blauen Donau.
If the last decade should have taught us one lesson, it’s that “the way it’s always been” in the past (or the tiny fraction of the past that each of us can remember from within our short lifetimes) is not a reliable indicator of what to expect going forward. As I have mentioned a few times already, in (what we used to think of as) a “normal” year here in Norway, the water-flow in our rivers would increase something like five-fold, and our hydropower reservoirs (i.e. lakes) would rise several meters above the “highest regulated water level” roughly during the 2nd half of may due to snowmelt in the mountains. By that standard 2021 still stands as the last somewhat “normal” year so far. The once so reliable “spring flood” has now been completely absent 3 times in the last 5 years, i.e. in 2022, 2025, and again this year. And despite how some people still like to spin it, the fact that 2023 and 2024 were the wettest years on record doesn’t mean the extremes “cancel out”, leaving everything “normal” on average.
I spent a few days in Berlin back in June, but it felt more like Athens with temperatures around 34 °C (according to some of the weather forecasts temperatures were expected to reach 39 °C the day after I left!). As a Norwegian I have always thought the main problem facing homeless people was exposure to the cold. In this case, however, the local media were reporting on homeless people suffering from heat strokes and dehydration. Not that it’s been very different in South-Eastern Norway where I live. A few weeks ago just a few kilometers from my home hundreds of homes were destroyed by probably the worst fire incident in modern Norwegian history. I’m not sure how the fire got started, but the bone dry conditions after weeks of baking sun and no rain sure as hell didn’t help the firefighters gain control over the situation.
All this and more (shorter and milder winters, longer and hotter summers, lethal heatwaves, catastrophic wildfires, severe droughts and floods, shrinking lakes and rivers and glaciers that hundreds of millions of people on this planet rely upon for drinking water, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, catastrophic hurricanes and tropical storms etc.) is after human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, have raised average global temperatures by a little more than one degree Celsius. The same models that predicted this was going to happen (many different models, working independently of each other, using different algorithms, different input data etc.) are now telling us that unless governments all over the world start immediately and colliectively phasing out fossil fuels far more rapidly and aggressively than any of them is currently even considering, we’re looking at something like 3-4 °C of global warming by the end of this century (and of course there is nothing magical about the end of the century, global temperatures are only going to continue rising after that). And, yet doing anything about the problem that has any chance of working is about as fringe a position as you’re going to find.
We may never get to that point, though. If I hear another word about a “fertility crisis” (unless the crisis in question is fertility itself), I’m going to drown the planet in a tsunami of vomit that is going to make Noah’s Flood look like a drought.
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