Is it just us, or is it getting hot around here?

Look outside and what do you see? If you’re lucky, you might be surrounded by lush greenery and blue skies, or maybe you’ll look out onto a grey, built-up street. Whatever the chances are, everything will look normal – nothing will strike you as being particularly peculiar, and it certainly won’t seem as if the world is ending. But the truth is, our planet is changing – it’s heating up, and quickly, too. Of course, we’re aware that our seas are flooded with plastic, and that the meat and dairy industries are leaking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but it’s easy to live our day-to-day lives and forget about the issues that our world is facing, because they don’t appear to affect our lives directly. As the circle of life continues, we’re left to wonder what kind of world our children will see when they reach our age, and whether they can look forward to a stable, steady future, or one with unpredictable weather, famine, and elevated levels of crime and war.

Extreme weather

Think about how our reactions change throughout a heatwave. To begin with, we all rejoice, fully exploiting our summer wardrobes as we lounge in the sun, spend our evenings in beer gardens and asking why on Earth the weather can’t always be so delightful. But as time goes on, the heat becomes a chore. We experience sweaty, sleepless nights, stand under cold showers and either have to work in stuffy offices, or fight our co-workers as we argue what temperature to set the air conditioning to. This transition can happen in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days, but the sun is never usually out for too long, before we return back to our normal lifestyles, and ‘normal’ weather. But what if these heat-waves become a permanent reality? It won’t happen overnight – the effects will happen slowly, so we will almost train ourselves to sleep through the hot nights, and to enjoy our morning showers a few degrees cooler. Even if it does happen incrementally, it is still happening and we can’t ignore it.