Week 22: Atomised Collective Lobotomy

Dear all,

Inevitable. Unstoppable. Forceful. Non-negotiable. Brutal. Beautiful. Subtle. Raw. Reality. I’ve been reading the following sentence over and over: “The global average temperature is expected to rise to almost 2°C above pre-industrial levels in the next five years,” according to a forecast by the World Meteorological Organization.

I read it once and wanted it to disappear from my screen. I tried to move on, to read something else. I tried, so to speak. But I kept going back. I read the forecast again. I read the data from Europe’s Copernicus observation agency.

Cars moved slowly through the morning traffic. Dog owners, in a zombie-like mood, shuffled between trees and doorposts, just wanting to get back to bed and their morning coffee. An ordinary day. Blue skies. The radio broadcast news of a market rebound after a failed tariff squabble. War updates from different parts of the world: the dead, the wounded, drones, humanitarian crises, dead children.

Ordinary. Nothing particularly new. Atomized collective lobotomy. Self-inflicted. Cozy. Warm. Careless. Safe. People slowly emerged onto the streets, on their way to work. Just an ordinary day.

The latest update: a glacier collapsed over a small Swiss village. Ordinary. Very much so. A calm radio voice stated the numbers: houses affected; people moved.

Next: sports and weather. The buzzing sound of morning delivery vehicles. Silence. Safe and ordinary silence. Nothing you’re about to read in this newsletter is ordinary, and certainly not safe.

It seems like the world is no longer inching toward a hotter future. We are being pulled into it. According to the latest forecast from the World Meteorological Organization, the planet’s average temperature is likely to get very close to 2 degrees Celsius above what it used to be in pre-industrial times. And that could happen within the next five years. That figure may not seem dramatic at first glance, but for scientists and those paying close attention to the Earth’s delicate balance, this is deeply alarming. They expect a host of ripple effects, from falling crop productivity to billions of people facing brutal heat waves that strain both bodies and power grids.