Europe Burns Under Record Summer Heat Wave

The summer’s heat is described in the record books as historic - hottest on record, most destructive droughts, deadliest wildfire season Europe has catalogued. What it concerns, more specifically, is a woman on the fifth floor of an unrenovated apartment block in Hamburg, whose landlord has not installed shutters because the building’s insulation was scheduled for retrofit in a budget cycle that has not yet arrived, and who spends the hottest hours of the afternoon sitting in a stairwell because it is four degrees cooler than her flat. The distance between the announcement of a “climate reckoning” and the stairwell she sits in is the distance this analysis aims to close.

I have read the accounts of this summer’s heat with the attention a deaf woman gives to a room she cannot hear across: watching who moves, who stays still, who has somewhere cooler to go. What I observe is that the word doing the most work in this summer’s commentary is “reckoning” - the suggestion, offered by politicians and taken up by sociologists such as Professor Stefan Eye-cot of the University of Hamburg, that a summer sufficiently terrible will itself produce the political will that decades of argument could not. It is a comforting idea, because it requires nothing of the people using it except the observation that the heat was bad. The reckoning, on this account, does the governing. No one need author it.

I would put the strongest form of that view fairly: perhaps a summer this destructive does change what is politically possible, in the way a flood changes what a town will pay for a levee. Wildfire smoke over a capital city is a more efficient teacher than a hundred reports. This is not nothing. But the mechanism by which a summer becomes policy runs through legislatures, and legislatures are populated by people who, like the professor delivering his lecture on reckoning, spend their heatwave in rooms with working air conditioning, moving between air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned chambers, for whom the summer is a subject of discussion rather than a physical condition to be endured. The woman in the stairwell and the sociologist analysing her situation are experiencing two different summers occurring in the same weeks, and only one of them writes the retrofit budget.

This is the comparison that the word “reckoning” obscures: a reckoning that is felt only by those without the power to legislate it is not a reckoning at all - it is simply weather, distributed by income and by the age of one’s building, and called by a grander name after the fact. The politicians speaking of Europe as the fastest-warming continent on earth are not wrong about the temperature. They are wrong, or at least imprecise, about who has been asked to pay the entry fee to the reckoning and who has been permitted to watch it from an air-conditioned gallery.

Translated into the language of the stairwell, the policy question this summer actually poses is not whether Europe has been sufficiently frightened - fright is cheap, and a continent can produce an inexhaustible supply of it without spending a euro - but whether the retrofit schedules, the shading ordinances, the emergency cooling centres, will move up the budget queue faster than the next heatwave arrives. That is a measurable thing. It has a date attached to it, or it does not. The professor’s sociology of reckoning is an account of what a summer means; the woman’s stairwell is an account of what a summer costs, and the two accounts are being written in different currencies.

The heat will recede, as it always does, sometime in September, and the debate will recede with it into next spring’s committee schedule. She will still be counting the floors to the stairwell.