But it remains an open question whether extreme weather events such as this month’s heat wave and fires will change that mindset.
“For Germany, I think last year’s floods were a bit of a wake-up call, as far as ‘Oh, the weather can be really deadly in Germany,'” Otto said. But she expressed her skepticism that the heat wave would have a similar effect. “People don’t die falling onto the streets in heat waves. People die quietly, in their poorly insulated houses.” And, she noted, the ones that are tend to be older adults and the poor and sick — groups for whom the impact of heat is more easily dismissed. “It’s the same people who are already dying from air pollution, and nobody cares,” she said.
Anna Walnycki, a climate change adaptation researcher at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, was more hopeful about extreme weather’s ability to draw attention to the direct human costs of climate change.
“These few days have really enabled people to see their grandmother suffer in the heat, the NHS is actually succumbing to the heat,” she said, referring to the UK’s National Health Service. By shifting from abstract discussions of net carbon emissions to local effects with “a human face”, she added, the heat wave could make a difference to public perception of how much countries like Britain have to lose from a changing climate – and how soon that could happen.
It is, of course, true that the poorer countries in the South, and the poorest people within them, are bearing the brunt of climate change. In May, I was in India near the end of its own record-breaking heat wave, when temperatures climbed much higher than in Europe. The effect on people’s livelihoods and survival was much more extreme than anything that happened here.
And even within the same city, temperatures can differentiate between rich and poor: Walnycki, whose research focuses primarily on Latin America and Africa, told me that poorer neighborhoods and informal settlements can become “heat islands” that get 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than nearby green suburbs due to the warming effect of paved ground, sparse greenery and limited shade.