Our grip on climate reality is melting in the heat

Just as the UK and western Europe settled into a reprieve from the recent heatwave, the mercury is rising again, with sweaty temperatures forecast this week. While this doesn’t look as extreme as last month’s heat dome, many people will be anxiously refreshing their weather apps for the rest of the summer, dreading the moment when seasonal warmth tips back into nightmare inferno mode.

Clearly, the climate chaos scientists predicted decades ago is here. Yet it seems like our grasp on the reality of the situation is getting fuzzier. Rather than clarifying the need to get a grip on emissions, some politicians and media outlets are responding to spiking temperatures by dismissing the need for climate action.

For a prime example, look to Norfolk, where a Reform UK councilor’s motion to scrap his authority’s climate emergency declaration was delayed on June 25 because it was too hot to debate it. In other words, a meeting to cancel the climate emergency was canceled because of the climate emergency.

The councilor, Austen Moore, wanted to see the declaration, which focuses on carbon dioxide emissions, replaced with a resilience strategy centered on flood defenses because, in his words: "You don’t spend all your money trying to stop a hurricane, tornado or earthquake."

Ultimately, Moore’s council rejected the motion, but he’s not the only one perpetuating that level of climate ignorance (consider the interview his party’s Deputy Leader Richard Tice gave my colleague Akshat Rathi in May). Of course, practical environmental action should be a priority. But as I’ve written before: Adapting to climate change without also reducing emissions is akin to trying to contain a pack of perpetually breeding rabid dogs without bothering to neuter them first.

Meanwhile, during the June heat dome, the newspapers were full of columns claiming that the 1976 heatwave was hotter — empirically untrue — and downplaying the seriousness of the conditions. Some, such as Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, even took the opportunity to attack "Net Zero nut jobs."

Here’s what those politicians and writers won’t tell you: Europe’s June heatwave — a severe event that set temperature and heat stress records despite happening so early in the summer — was unambiguously the result of fossil-fuel emissions.

That’s the conclusion of a study by scientists at World Weather Attribution, an academic collaboration specializing in rapid analysis of extreme events. Using historical data and peer-reviewed methods, the researchers found that had a heatwave of similar rarity and intensity occurred in 1976, when many of Europe’s previous records were set, temperatures would have been about 3.5C cooler during the day. Similarly, they would have been about 2C cooler in 2003, the year of the continent’s first major 21st century heatwave. The authors also tested whether El Nino — a natural climate pattern characterized by above average sea-surface temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean — might have played a role, and found that it didn’t. That leaves our emissions as the culprit.

It’s easy to dismiss denial and disinformation as representative of a small fraction of the population, but even those genuinely concerned about the environment are guilty of internalizing climate mistruths. London Climate Action Week, a citywide event where thousands of people gathering more than 1,000 panels and talks, took place during the peak of the recent heat wave. At a panel I had moderated, an audience member asked: "Isn’t net zero just greenwashing?"

I can see why they posed the question. "Net Zero" has been misused and politicized and misused. Corporations have applied it to their energy transition plans that do little more than plant a few trees while continuing to spew pollution. Those on the far-right wielded the term as a weapon in the culture wars, claiming, for example, that solar power would leave us starving by taking over the UK’s farmland. (In reality, solar farms currently cover about 0.1% of country. In the unlikely event that we meet our solar targets using only ground-mounted panels, they’d take up just 0.6% of the utilized agricultural area.)

As a result, it’s become detached from its original scientific meaning: A state where global emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are balanced by the permanent removal of the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Achieving net zero requires that we dramatically reduce fossil-fuel use, electrify our heat, power, transportation and industry where possible and restore carbon-sucking natural landscapes to their former glory. The small amount of remaining emissions must be extracted from the atmosphere or caught and stored before they’re released. That’s not greenwashing, that’s literally how we’ll stop climate change.

The UK’s 2050 target date for reaching this equilibrium is also rooted in evidence, chosen because scientists from around the world agreed it would give us the best chance of meeting the Paris Agreement temperature target of an increase of 1.5C while being realistic and achievable.

Anyone trying to dilute the role of fossil fuels in extreme heat or weaponize the concept of net zero is either misinformed or willfully ignorant. As we all face up to the sweaty, miserable, anxiety-inducing and dangerous consequences of our emissions, it’s vital that we — and our politicians — remember that.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.