For three days in a row, the UK has experienced record-breaking temperatures for June. What we are living through today is not just a heatwave. Closed schools, water pipe bans and unfortunate drownings make the headlines, but under the surface, we are in the midst of a huge health emergency that will kill thousands.
You may remember the summer of 2022. That was the last time Britain experienced an intense heatwave. What you might not remember is Nature Medicine’s analysis showing around 3,500 people were killed by the heatwave that summer. For context, this is six times the UK homicide rate that year.
Then, as now, the fossil fuel bots, the far right, and the misinformed have taken to their keyboards to casually explain that it was just like this in 1976 and that, while the weather is exceptional, there is no climate emergency. The data demonstrating the climate emergency is, of course, voluminous. Tracked on a daily basis by scientists across the globe, whose work is subject to academic peer review, our planet is slowly but surely going through a global climate transformation which will fundamentally change billions of lives for the worse, unless huge reductions in fossil fuel emissions are implemented.
Climate scientists are concerned about the present European heatwave, Europe being the fastest-warming continent on the globe, but they are also alarmed about the prospects of Europe’s summer of 2027. The reason for this is what is happening presently in the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of rising global temperature is being absorbed by the oceans, not on land. The Pacific is the home of El Niño and La Niña, climate processes that alternately heat and cool the planet in irregular cycles.
Scientists are by profession a cautious bunch and not prone to superlatives, so when New Scientist’s climate specialists talk about a ‘Super El Niño’ just beginning in the Pacific, you can be sure that it is time to sit up and take notice – especially when the most recent modelling points to a much greater impact on the continent of Europe.
What is currently developing in the Eastern Pacific is an El Niño of extraordinary intensity, which creates the possibility of an even more intense heatwave in Europe next summer. At this rate, the UK’s target of net zero by 2050, a target deemed acceptable by business, will be far too little, far too late. However, do expect wider and deeper attacks on net zero led by the fossil lobby and supported from all quarters, either under the guise of promoting carbon capture technology, saving jobs, or even resisting “Green hysteria”.
As professor of applied environmental science Ian Williams has recently pointed out, rises in global temperatures do not impact individuals equally. While each person can take individual steps to keep cool, he says, “they cannot make unsafe housing safe, cool badly ventilated care homes, or protect outdoor workers”. In short, it is the poorest and most vulnerable, wherever they live, who will experience the brunt of this and next year’s heating.
Almost two centuries ago, when Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, he described the dreadful environmental conditions of working-class life in Manchester and the phenomenal death rate that resulted. Engels called this “social murder” – not a man with a knife or a gun, but an economic system, capitalism, that kills the poor incidentally, as a simple externality of profit-seeking.
Two centuries on, we are witnessing social murder on a grander scale – perhaps 140,000 people across Europe this and next summer, mainly the old, the poor, or those with health vulnerabilities – because of the resistance of fossil fuel companies and the lobbyists they fund to oppose decarbonisation. However, be sure that, just as in Engels’s time, no arrests will be made for this social murder.
Socialists and the labour movement need to step forward to defend the most vulnerable and demand a rapid justice and jobs-led transition to a decarbonised economy that will save tens of thousands of working-class lives.
Subscribe to our regular updates to receive the latest articles, analysis and news direct to your inbox at https://theleftlane.media/subscribe/
