I live in Paris. The heat has been relentless since the beginning of summer, each wave warmer than the one before. The meteorological office is unable to predict the heat because no statistics exist for these levels in the region. Hot air rises from the pavements, the buildings are baked in the sun, tourists sweat in the streets, and shopkeepers say there are no fans or air conditioners to be bought for love or money until October.
Years of extreme heat in Pakistan
My mother lives in Pakistan. The 35-degree summers of my childhood, with the occasional high of 40, now seem almost temperate. These days, 50-degree centigrade temperatures are common in summer. Add chronic lack of water, power cuts and extreme poverty, to really make it challenging. The lucky ones, like my family, have gigantic solar panels on top of their houses. They generate electricity and shield them from the sun. Everyone else simply endures. Many die.
Denial and irony
On my way north, I spend a night in London with a friend. After many sleepless nights, and weeks of tossing and turning in her sweltering flat, she’s triumphantly finally managed to buy an air conditioner. “The oven seemed cooler than my home”, she says smiling brightly. She works for the fossil fuel industry.
Tariffing while the world burns
I used to live in New York, where the sky has been yellow for days. My friends there tell me there is an overwhelming stench of burning in the particle-filled air, acrid and nauseating. I just read an article on Bluesky: Trump said he is going to raise tariffs on Canada to punish it for the forest wildfire smoke blowing south. Like that is going to help. Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. Tariffication seems like the only instrument this US president can play, and it will be just as useful as Nero’s fiddle.
Denial is a powerful combusting agent
The world has been burning for years. Now the flames are edging ever closer to the arsonist, who cannot quite grasp that the fire doesn’t recognise property lines, and that his own home is in danger. The fires are catching up, closer and closer to the arsonist, who still does not want to accept that he will lose his own home because of the match he lit far away. Denial is an extraordinary accelerant.
The parable of the boiling frog
There is an old parable about the boiling frog. It tells the story of a frog blissfully swimming around in water in a pot, unaware that it is slowly being heated to a boil. The frog remains in the pot until it dies, boiled alive, unable to perceive the slow and gradually increasing temperature.
Scottish Highlands, a last refuge?
I am heading up to the Highlands for a few weeks in August. My friend up there calls me to tell me jokingly they, too, have a heat wave: temperatures have reached a staggering 24 degrees. I laugh to myself quietly. Scotland has been my refuge through troubled times over the past few years. Its calm stillness has given me space to write, to heal, and to begin again. The remoteness, the wildness, the sheer, raw beauty of the land, and the warm welcoming kindness of its people, all have been a balm for the soul.
To boil or not to boil, that is the question
But then I read of plans to drill for more oil here too. Instead of preparing for the tsunami of heat that has engulfed other areas not too far away now, even here in Scotland we appear to want to add fuel to the fire. I worry that, like the frog in the old story, we will continue to sit calmly in the gently warming pot – until it is too late.
