What is the climate crisis all about?  According to Simon Lewis a professor of Global Change Science at the University College London and the University of Leeds,

“The climate crisis means that summer is a time of increasingly dangerous heat. In the Pacific Northwest last week temperature records were not broken, but obliterated. In another heatwave earlier in June, five Middle East countries topped 50C.  The extreme heat reached Pakistan, where 20 children in one class were reported to have fallen unconscious and needed medical treatment for heat.”

One of the things that is becoming more common, in the last year or two, is climate scientists no longer being shy about attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. Until recently they refused to do that. Now the gloves have come off the scientific hands. As Lewis said,

“Additional warming from greenhouse gas emissions means extreme heat waves are mor likely and scientists can now calculate the increase in their probability.  The 2019 European heatwave that killed 2,500 people, for example, was five times more likely than it would have been without global warming.”

This was not expected, at least, not this soon. Climate change is here. That is the lesson of the summer of 2021. In some places climate change is becoming ugly. For example, as Lewis pointed out,

In places in the Middle East and Asia, something truly terrifying is emerging: unlivable heat. When both temperature and humidity are high, neither sweating nor soaking can cool us. The “wet bulb” temperature—given by a thermometer covered in wet cloth—show the temperature at which evaporative cooling from sweat or water occurs. Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to a wet-bulb temperature beyond 35C because there is no way to cool our bodies. Not even in the shade, not even with unlimited water.

A wet bulb temperature was once thought impossible. But last year scientists reported that places in the Persian Gulf and Pakistan’s Indus river valley had reached the threshold, although only for an hour or two. Heatwaves and accompanying unlivable temperatures are predicted to last longer and occur over larger areas and in new places, including parts of Africa and the US southeast.

We are in for some interesting times. Are we ready for them? I would be surprised if we are.