On: 'Hotter and hotter and hotter' - Europe's new climate in seven charts

July 5, 2026

The charts are precise enough. Seven of them, tracing the same trajectory in seven different dialects - surface temperature, soil moisture, nighttime minimums, agricultural zones shifting north at the pace of a century per decade. The science is sound. The science has been sound for thirty years. One begins to suspect that soundness is not the missing ingredient.

What strikes me is the framing. “Scientists warn this is a sign of things to come.” The future tense is doing political work here. The Mediterranean is already uninhabitable in August. British farmers are already planting maize where wheat grew. The warming is not approaching. It has arrived and is being described as pending, which is a convenient tense for those who wish to delay response without appearing to deny the phenomenon.

The economists who model carbon as an externality to be priced at the margin are performing the same trick the Treasury performed in 1929: presenting a political failure as a technical puzzle. The atmosphere does not require a more accurate discount rate. It requires a decision. The decision is being postponed by people who will not live to see its worst consequences, which is the precise opposite of my old observation about the long run. They are counting on being dead. That is the entire policy.

The aggregate here is not demand but carbon concentration, and the mechanism is the same: what every individual does rationally in isolation produces catastrophe in aggregate. The market cannot price what it cannot own, and nobody owns the sky. This is not a market failure. It is a market boundary. What lies beyond the boundary requires governance - a word that has fallen out of fashion precisely as its subject matter has become urgent.

The temperature will not negotiate. That is its advantage over the policymakers.