We Just Lived Through Two of the Hottest Days Ever. Does Anyone Care? [View all]

The climate crisis is cooking the planet faster than we ever imagined, and extreme heat is killing us. What will it take to shake us into action?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/two-hottest-days-ever-1235068388/

Earlier this week, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union-funded research group, announced that last Sunday, July 21, 2024, the daily global average temperature hit 62.76 degrees. It was the hottest day scientists have measured since 1940 — which officially makes it the hottest day ever recorded on Earth by humans. Twenty four hours later, however, Copernicus had to update its report: On Monday, the temperature climbed up to 62.87 degrees. As of now, July 22, 2024 is now the hottest day ever recorded.

Are you shocked by news of this record-breaking heat? Does the fact that you lived through two of the hottest days on Earth that scientists have ever recorded make you think differently about the risks and consequences of living on a rapidly-warming planet? Did you pause for a moment and think about the millions of people who sweat through this without air conditioning? Did you mourn the 396 deaths from heat that are under investigation this summer in Phoenix? Did you sell your car and buy an electric bike? Were you inspired to sign up to knock on doors to help Kamala Harris defeat the climate-hoax-pushing-criminal Donald Trump? Are you getting calls from your MAGA-loving uncle in Idaho apologizing for the long lecture he gave you at Thanksgiving last year about how Earth’s temperature moves in natural cycles, or about how higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is good because more CO2 makes crops and trees grow better? Probably not.

The problem is not you. The problem is that a broken heat record is just another statistic. The story of the climate crisis is written in broken records that measure levels of CO2 pollution, glacial ice melt, rising sea levels, crop failure, megafires, the spread of diseases, heat deaths, wildfire and insurance costs, and economic losses. But if shocking data and broken records could galvanize people to take action on climate, we’d all be powering our iPhones with solar power from microgrids, and millions of cows and chickens would be liberated from factory farms. We’d have cities crowded with bike lanes and a high speed rail service between Dallas and Houston. We’d laugh at climate-hoaxing politicians and debate whether it is fair and just to charge Big Oil companies with criminally negligent homicide.

First, nobody cares about numbers. They care about stories. They care about emotion. They care about life, death, hope, dreams. And money. A heat statistic is not a visceral thing. It is a data point. And thanks to years of strategic targeting of trusted media and scientific institutions by far-right autocrats everywhere, we live in a world that increasingly distrusts data points. Where is the line between fake news and fake data? On social media platforms, it’s easy to find climate deniers claiming that temperature monitoring stations are all located in hot places on airport runways or in sun-baked parking lots, suggesting that there is some grand conspiracy to crank up the temperature readings so that George Soros can control the world and force you to sell your jacked-up 4-wheeler and grill crickets instead of hamburgers at your next summer BBQ.