当四十度成为新常态：西欧热浪，与我们共同的夏天

Today we'll talk about something happening right before our eyes,

and destined to be brought up again and again —

this summer, Western Europe

is going through

an early, fierce, and persistent heatwave.

Let's first talk about 'early'.

This high heat began at the end of May.

Mind you, at that point,

summer hadn't even officially arrived.

But Portugal,

at the time, shot above forty degrees,

directly breaking the historical record for May.

And entering June,

the situation became even more extreme.

Let's look at a set of alarming numbers.

France's capital, Paris,

this year is expected, for the first time,

to break forty degrees in June.

For a city renowned for its mild climate,

this is almost unimaginable.

Parts of Spain and Portugal —

temperatures are approaching forty-five degrees.

Italy, the UK, Germany,

Belgium, Switzerland …

most of Western Europe

is blanketed under this heatwave.

Temperatures in many places

are a full ten to fifteen degrees

higher than the same period in past years.

So, the question arises:

what on earth is going on?

To understand this heatwave,

you need to learn a term,

called a 'heat dome'.

Let me give you a metaphor.

You can imagine it as

a giant pot,

turned upside down over Western Europe.

In a normal weather system,

the atmosphere flows up and down, constantly exchanging.

But this time,

an unusually powerful high-pressure system,

like a boulder,

has pressed down hard over Western Europe,

refusing, for a long while, to move.

It seals the hot air beneath it

firmly shut,

letting heat in but not out.

The sun bakes it day after day,

and the temperature inside the pot

keeps building, climbing higher and higher.

To make matters worse,

this time,

there's also rolling heat from the Sahara in North Africa,

swept into the system.

Dry, hot, and on top of that 'stewed' —

together they've created this

intensely destructive high heat.

And the word 'destructive'

is by no means scaremongering.

Extreme heat

is one of the deadliest forms of weather

on this planet.

It doesn't arrive dramatically,

like a typhoon or a flood,

but it often, silently and without a sound,

takes the lives of the most vulnerable —

the elderly living alone,

young children,

and those

already suffering from illness.

In just last month's round of heat,

in Spain alone,

more than a hundred people

passed away due to the high heat.

France, too, had several deaths.

Behind these cold numbers

are individual,

vivid people who will never come back.

Facing the menacing heat,

governments of every country

have activated emergency mechanisms:

issuing the highest-level red alerts,

opening air-conditioned public cooling centers,

adjusting school and outdoor-work hours,

and going door to door

to visit the elderly living alone.

These efforts all matter.

But if we lift our gaze

from this one heatwave,

just a little higher,

we'll see a

more unsettling picture.

Almost all climate scientists

keep stressing the same sentence:

this kind of early, strong, persistent extreme heat

is shifting from a 'once-in-decades anomaly'

into a 'comes-every-year normal'.

This year is very hot,

last year was very hot,

the year before, equally hot.

Behind this

is a trend line so clear

it cannot be argued away:

our planet

is getting warmer

year by year.

And climate change

is the invisible hand

pushing the temperature up.

Speaking of this,

I want to talk with you about

a deeper layer of this.

For a long time,

'global warming',

to many people,

has been a somewhat abstract,

somewhat distant,

even somewhat tiresome word.

We hear it in the news,

read it in textbooks,

yet find it hard to truly

feel its sting on our own skin.

But this summer in Western Europe

is changing all of that.

When forty-degree heat

starts, again and again,

to surge into our cities,

to surge into our lives,

climate change

is no longer a chart,

a forecast,

a slogan.

It has become

the heat that you and I, every summer,

must bear in person —

that real, scalding heat.

It is also posing to us

an unavoidable

question:

a warming planet —

exactly

which generation's problem

is it to face?

The last generation's?

Or

precisely ours,

and our children's?

At the end of the show,

I want to leave you

with two questions.

First, back to your own life.

In these years,

have you truly felt

that summer

is becoming harder to endure, year by year?

Second,

facing a hotter and hotter future,

we may not be able,

by our own strength alone,

to cool the planet down.

But within what you're able to do,

is there one small thing

you'd be willing,

starting this summer,

to begin doing?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth thinking about slowly.