This reminds me about that fictional weather forecast for a hot summer day in August 2050 that French TV did back in 2015. In it, they predicted that it would take around 35 years before summer temperatures in France would reach 40 degrees. But the reality of the climate crisis is so much worse than people predicted. France is already—barely a decade since—experiencing such extreme temperatures.
And all those nuclear power plants going offline in France every summer now due to too high water temperatures and low water flows from melting Swiss glaciers? That’s been somewhat normalized now. But that sure wasn’t a point of discussion in the mainstream, and it wasn’t brought up as a potential risk when nuclear and climate change was discussed in Europe just ten years ago or so.
Our social and political imaginations are simply not big enough to really get the reality and severity of climate change. We’re simply not prepared for the climate crisis. And now we’re reaping the consequences of politicians failing to heed decades of warnings from scientists.
