In a previous article, we took a somewhat fantastical look at future heatwaves in a France being severely punished by particularly vicious climate change. It was a very bombastic vision of a not-too-distant future. It took place in 2050 or 2060, a mere thirty or so years hence, at a time when some of us will probably have left this earth in a recyclable cardboard coffin or, even better, have been composted into human fertilizer to feed whatever is left of the trees and plants. We imagined too a planet made barren by warm winds coming from who knows where, people forced to drink nasty, brackish water from underground reservoirs, polluted by years of intensive farming and waste that had been buried to make things tidy outdoors. It was a sarcastic take for the sake of amusement, and also reassurance that the change was perhaps not going to take place immediately …
A few days ago, a guy from France’s CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) spoke on the radio, between two cheesy pop music programmes. He didn’t have the monotonous, reserved tone of scientists of his type, but his voice undulated, oscillated between fanatical anger and desperate emotion. He told of the end of a world, his world, our world … something unprecedented that had just happened and that would be repeated in the years to come … Now it is certain: we can no longer speak of the climate changing, because the climate has already changed.
http://www.cnrs.fr/en/two-french-climate-models-consistently-predict-pronounced-global-warming
