heat waves – The News Desk

When 2023 began, it seemed likely to be just one more year in the ongoing collapse of the world’s climate system. We were at the tail end of a long La Niña cold period in the Pacific, which meant that, although global temperatures had been near record levels for the past few years, they hadn’t quite topped 2016, the period of the last strong El Niño, which brought the hottest year to date—not to mention considerable havoc from Australia to Alaska. Amid signs of that Pacific warm current starting to build anew, climatologists looked ahead to next year as the time when all hell might break loose. Experts said it was possible that in 2024 we could go past 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—the mark that we had pledged to try to avoid at the Paris climate summit just eight ...

I’ve been travelling by train across Central Europe this hot summer and, as often happens with Americans, I’ve been reminded of the sheer density of human history in older corners of the world. On Sunday morning, for instance, I spent a few hours at Hrad Devín, or Devín Castle, a stone ruin a dozen kilometres upriver from the center of the (low-key and utterly charming) Slovakian city of Bratislava, on the Austrian border, at the spot where the bluish-green Danube meets the olive Morava, flowing in from the mountains of the Czech-Polish border. It’s such a clearly strategic spot that it’s no wonder people have been settling here for millennia. There are excavations of an old Celtic community from the first century B.C., ultimately replaced by a Germanic population that established links w...

Tag: heat waves

The U.N. Announces the Hottest Year

Heat Waves and the Sweep of History