“One of the big problems we still have with climate change is that it’s always being discussed with someone else, as if it were happening in the future,” Otto said. “And for Europeans,’someone else’ is a Global North and Global South.”
But whether extreme weather events like this month’s heat waves and fires will change that mindset remains an open question.
“For Germany, I think last year’s flood was a bit of a wake-up call, as long as” oh, the weather in Germany can actually be fatal, “” Otto said. However, she expressed her skepticism that heat waves would have a similar effect. “People do not fall down the streets in heat waves and die. People die quietly in poorly insulated homes.” And she is the elderly, the poor and the sick, the fever. He said that he tends to be a group that can easily dismiss the effects of. “It’s the same people who are already dead from air pollution, and no one cares,” she said.
Anna Walnycki, a researcher on climate change adaptation at the International Institute for Environment and Development, based in London, was more excited about the ability of extreme weather events to pay attention to the immediate human costs of climate change.
“In the last few days I’ve been able to see grandmas who are actually suffering from the heat. NHS is actually buckling under the tension of the heat,” she told the UK National Health Service. Mentioned and said. By shifting from the abstract debate about net carbon emissions to the regional impact of the “human face,” heat waves are about how much a country like Britain will suffer from climate change, and what. She added that it could make a difference in the public’s perception of losing as soon as possible. That can happen.
Of course, it is true that the poor countries of the Global North and Global South and the poorest of them are at the mercy of climate change. In May, when temperatures were much higher than in Europe, I was in India towards the end of my own record heat wave. The impact on people’s lives and survival was far more extreme than what was happening here.