CLIMATE CRISIS
Don’t Be the Ostrich
Stop hiding your head in the sand
In some areas of Athens on Tuesday, April 2nd 2024, the temperature peaked at 30° C (86° F).
This isn’t normal.
April in Greece was firmly the beginning of Spring. Even in our moderate, Mediterranean climate, I remember Easters of my childhood when we had rains and relative chill. The traditional custom of making spit-roast lamb outdoors on Easter Sunday was sometimes carried out in covered spaces, as the rain wouldn’t allow keeping a fire going for the hours needed.
In fact, a couple of times in my nearly 50-year life, I have seen snow in April. But never, ever have I witnessed 30°C temperatures in early April, nor week-long T-shirt weather in March. March was infamously unsteady, with frequent rains, even storms, and often chilly weather.
I still have a 44-year-old condo regulation, which is used to determine central heating operation hours. According to that document, central heating was supposed to run from November to mid-April, and maintain a temperature of 20° C (35.6° F) throughout the building, even when outside temperature fell as low as 0°C (freezing). It’s a relic of a bygone age when central heating was supposed to run for a minimum of eight hours per day for all these four-and-a-half months. Today this would cost as much as the rent itself, but that’s an entirely different story.
Thankfully, we can now go without central heating for most of that time. There isn’t a real Spring any longer in Greece, nor Autumn. We’re going straight from a 40°C (104° F) Summer to a slightly less warm Fall, with minimal rain. It’s not uncommon now for people to go to the beach in October, something that was reserved only for winter swimmers just two or three decades ago. The usual month of vacation for me and my wife is now September, so that we can avoid the August crowds and the oppressive heat. We get maybe a day of wind and very light drizzle.
On the other hand, June, that was traditionally the first month of summer vacations, with average temperatures around what we have this year in April, is often plagued by thunderstorms and even gale-force winds. Tourists often scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering where the famous Greek summer has gone. June is slowly becoming our very own sub-tropical rainy season.
I don’t need NASA to tell me that the weather patterns in my country have changed in my lifetime. I can see it every day. The statistics are useful, because they document with accuracy what people already feel: almost every month is now the hottest ever recorded, respectively. In fact, February 2024 marked the 9th month in a row that was the hottest on record.
In Greece, abnormally high temperatures in winter sometimes alternate with short, but brutal freezing spells. In summer or fall, sudden torrential rains cause terrible damage. They rarely last more than a day. Long dry periods follow. Last year’s “Daniel” storm is considered the most extreme rainfall event in the recorded history of Greece. Apart from seventeen people dead, the flood killed more than 200,000 animals, ruining almost every farmer in the area of Thessaly. This event came just one year after the infamous floods in Pakistan, which left a huge part of the country inundated for months.
These extreme events cause devastation that takes years to recover from. It is estimated that if this kind of rainfall happened in Athens, the port area of Piraeus and the southwestern districts of our capital would suffer incalculable damage and long-term disruption. It’s not really a matter of “if”, but “when”.
I mentioned before that this weather isn’t normal. That was a mistake. This is the new normal. And it will get progressively worse. And it will not stop unless we don’t do whatever is humanly possible to limit our CO2 emissions to a minimum.
Some people insist, even to this day, to deny the obvious, citing obscure “research” no one has heard of. They ignore the fact that even the main perpetrators of the crime against our planet have known about the consequences of our fossil fuel addiction long before the public became aware about it. Exxon Mobil knew about it since the ’70s. The earliest research funded by oil and car companies began as early as 1954.
Five major oil companies, led by Chevron, have admitted in court, in 2017, that there is no debate about climate science. Perhaps Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum and ExxonMobil are all part of some nefarious green conspiracy, attempting to sabotage their own industry, but it seems unlikely.
The jig is up. It’s not that these companies had a change of heart and decided to make amends. It’s impossible to undo what they’ve done and, furthermore, it’s also a bit unfair to blame only them. This is not to say that their actions weren’t criminal, but we have to admit that our capitalist system didn’t know how else to function apart from devouring all the resources it could and churning out an endless stream of consumer goods. The oil companies provided the fuel for this insane race, but they weren’t the only ones trying to hide the truth. Capitalists (as well as the communist USSR that took pride in its industrial might) wilfully ignored the signs and tried to bury the research, at least the part of it that was in the open.
50 years later, it’s impossible to hide the truth. And, yet, some people still insist on ignoring reality and burying their heads in the sand, thinking that all scientists are trying to do is ruin their way of life. They don’t realize that their lifestyle was just a wild party that was going to end, sooner or later.
It’s time to pay the bill.
