In which is told about the global extreme weather during the summer of 2024, about the climate crisis that is becoming ever more pressing, about why that climate crisis is not even our biggest problem, and about the solutions that are everywhere up for grabs, just not where currently being sought.
“We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it's up to us now to heed them.”
Bill Mc Kibben
Dead corn in the fields, Somogy county, Hungary, summer 2024
Dear readers and followers of A Biosphere Project,
As the old dictum goes, there is good news and bad news.
I'll start with the bad news, then that's already taken care of. But as always, there is also good news.
In my first musing of the new season, I mentioned that the summer in Hungary, my second homeland, was one of heat and drought. For two months the country, along with much of central, eastern, and southern Europe, was under a blanket of almost constant heat, with only very occasional and limited rainfall.
For most days of this summer, temperatures hovered between 35 and 40 degrees celsius (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit). In some parts of southern Europe, the mercury went even higher.
The little rain that fell in Hungary was absolutely insufficient to save the harvest: thousands and thousands of acres of corn and sunflowers were standing dead in the fields everywhere, just like two years ago when the country, along with just about all of Europe, endured a merciless heat wave and drought. The entire Carpathian Basin looked like a desert even from space.
It was painful to see the endless fields of dead corn or sunflowers during our walks around our village. The situation must be catastrophic for the farmers, and I can only hope that there are enough support measures to help them through this disaster. But even then: it is not a question of if, but when the next heat wave will come, and monocultures like these are actually doomed in the changing climate.
Following the drought came the floods, at least in neighboring countries: Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland were hard hit. Some areas received the equivalent of several months of rain in a single day, with disastrous consequences. The deluge left a trail of destruction, as it did in parts of Belgium and the German Eiffel region a few years earlier.
In Austria, up to two meters of snow fell in some areas right after a sustained heat wave. A 'freak event,' and there are more and more of them.
'Freak events' like these or the extraordinary cold waves in the southern U.S. and Argentina
do not seem to point directly to global warming. These anomalies could just as easily consist of exceptionally cold and wet springs, as was experienced in northwestern Europe this year. Therefore, it has already been suggested that 'global weirding' may be a better term than 'global warming' to describe what is happening on a planetary scale. The average temperature of the planet is rising, that much is clear, but rather than uniform warming, it is leading to greater extremes in both directions, and a destabilization that could just as easily manifest itself in cold waves. The weather is becoming more unpredictable, more extreme, and more destructive. Elsewhere in Europe, as in previous years, Greece experienced devastating forest fires immediately followed by equally devastating floods. Fierce forest fires also ravaged northern Portugal , while Romania and Bosnia were also affected by extreme rainfall and flash floods.
Once again these weather events in Europe were part of a global pattern. As I write this, damage is being measured in the southeastern U.S., where Hurricane Helene went from a category one to category four in no time, with devastating effects in the Carolinas and Kentucky, among others. Entire communities were wiped out in a storm without precedent for that region: Asheville in North Carolina is 500 miles from the coast, a distance that is normally “hurricane-safe”. But with the increasing strength of hurricanes, they can also reach much farther inland than before. The winds have barely subsided in the Carolinas and Hurricane Milton is already racing toward Florida across the Gulf of Mexico. Milton has also rapidly grown to a category four hurricane, fueled by the abnormally warm waters of the Gulf.
In Nepal, more than two hundred people died last week in flash floods that wiped entire villages off the map.
In an initial version of this blog post, I had listed in more detail the climate disasters (floods, taifoens, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, drought, etc.) that plagued various parts of the world last summer. But after some “soul-searching,” I have omitted this list for now. On the one hand because this blog post was going to become terribly long as a result, and I promised myself to keep blog posts concise to the extent possible. On the other hand, because this listing is really quite terrifying. Possibly part of the reason why the media still leaves so much unmentioned or gives far too little coverage. Forwarding a list of disasters to you, dear readers, without enough additional information and context can lead to panic, which is not my intention.
It's an interesting balancing act: on the one hand, we need to be way more more concerned than the mainstream media make it seem; on the other hand, we need to remain well aware that there are many solutions, and many answers to this challenge that can make the world a much more beautiful place. But we must not bury our heads in the sand, and face the reality of climate disruption and many other cycles in our biosphere.
As Bill Mc Kibben, one of the founders of 350 .org, put it, “We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it's up to us now to heed them.”
The 'wake-up call is there, but is it being listened to yet? Many of the calamities are highlighted only indirectly or in passing in the media, and are often not identified as signs of the climate crisis. Only three percent of U.S. coverage of Hurricane Helene mentioned the climate crisis. Moreover, scattered events are often treated as stand-alone entities, and most media do not connect the dots of global catastrophe, as Extreme Weather Report did for this week on Instagram.
Until the media starts to present the global pattern of crises as something that deserves our constant intense attention and requires an adequate and far-reaching response as a global community to a daily evolving emergency, our society is not going to adequately respond to this existential crisis.
It is somewhat akin to the task of a physician who summons a patient to communicate a very difficult truth: the patient is very ill, and the condition is possibly deadly. Only a far-reaching change of lifestyle can offer hope for a path towards healing.
If the doctor would choose to communicate only the very bad news, and try to highlight the extraordinary severity of the disease without also pointing out the reason why there is still a chance of a cure, the patient is likely to sink into denial, depression, apathy, or worse. As Tony Robbins put it, “change begins when the pain of nót changing becomes greater than the pain of changing.” But when do we reach that point? In many places on this planet, that point has long since been crossed, as was clear to me from the list I have omitted for now, or from the reel of Extreme Weather Report, but as long as the pain being experienced in so many places does not penetrate our collective consciousness with sufficient force, even in the areas that have been relatively spared, we will continue to live in denial - with all the consequences that entails. This remains a crucial role for our media, which, however, is still not sufficiently taking up that role. I will talk more about that another time. That overview of disaster, perhaps I'll share that again sometime. But then in a form where I also give the reason why this does not yet mean that all is already lost.
Those who want to look further could, until recently, visit the site Floodlist , among others, but they haven't updated since June. Maybe it became too much for them as well. You can also take a look at Greenpeace's Global Fire Dashboard .
If you are one of those who have already faced all that bad news in greater detail, and have become extraordinarily sad or anxious as a result: that is not surprising. If it makes you despair, that is unjustified. There are still many paths to a different future, and I will explore those paths further with you in this blog.
As I pointed out in the title of this post, the calamities I just mentioned, which we commonly refer to as the “climate crisis,” are not even the biggest problem we face. The destabilization of temperature, carbon and water cycles are the expression of an underlying disease that has to do with all aspects of what we call “civilization,” as was also clear from the interview with social philosopher and systems thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger in the previous musing.
And from that interview it was also clear that there is still reason for hope, despite the seemingly insurmountable difficulties we see converging in a “perfect storm”.
But because we are so focused on too narrow an aspect of this meta-crisis, we overlook many possible solutions. If we begin to see that the well-being of our biosphere is not just a matter of temperature and CO2, but of the health of the myriads of life forms with which we share the planet, and of the integrity of the many cycles that make that biosphere breathe and live, of which the carbon cycle is one but certainly not the only one (the water cycle maybe plays an even more decisive role), then we will also begin to see the many ways in which we can help restore the balance between all these cycles.
If we start to see that everything in our biosphere plays a role in what we call “climate,” it also becomes clear that literally everything in our biosphere can also be a part of the solutions.
But we have to let go of the idea that we are going to be able to formulate answers to these challenges with mere technological innovations. Soon, in this blog, I will feature some top experts on energy who will clarify why this is so.
So again, that does not mean that there is no hope, just that the (many) solutions lie elsewhere. Our house is on fire yes, but to save the house we will have to think very differently, and above all reconnect with the living being that is our biosphere.
As I said, there is always good news and bad news. The bad news I listed at the beginning of this blog post (even though I left out a lot). The good news remains: another world is possible, one in which we will succeed in formulating the right answers to these challenges. I have already talked about some of those answers (including regenerative agriculture and degrowth), and I will also explore those possible answers further in this blog. Many of those answers still remain out of our sight at the moment, and will require a major revolution in all areas of human activity, but they exist. Despair is misplaced, even if the future now seems dark and frightening. We face gigantic challenges and times when nature will increasingly force us to take the next step in the transition through which we must pass. But as Daniel Schmachtenberger so eloquently pointed out with the analogy of the phase transition from caterpillar to butterfly: the end result of that process can be a more beautiful world (no matter how distant that world may seem now). The overwhelming power of Mother Nature will increasingly present us with a choice: do we want to choose life, and another form of existence in our biosphere?
Thanks for reading or listening, and have a wonderful day. In a future blog post, some news about my plans with a book, and news about an upcoming fundraiser for A Biosphere Project.
All the best to you,
Filip
