I was trying to push in the glass front door of the wine shop to get a look at its wares, but it wouldn’t budge.
Locked, I figured. Closed for the early-afternoon siesta, or whatever they call a mid-day nap in France. But no — here came the owner, a young woman. She stepped up to the indoor handle and, putting all her weight behind it, yanked. The door flew open, allowing me entry.
Sizing me up immediately as also a Yank, she addressed me in English as to the situation.
”It’s the heat,” she said. ”We’ve never had it like this. So the plastic, what do you call it, lining around the glass — it has … grown. Expanded. It’s the heat.” This was in Sarlat-la-Caneda, a 14th-century town that does not have, because it’s never needed it, air conditioning. It needs it now. Afternoons, it was 100 degrees outside our rented apartment, and seemed very much hotter within it. The landlady apologized, said something about AC being against the local zoning codes in these ancient buildings, and noted that she had added two floor fans to the place. At night, placed at the foot of the bed, they blew like a hurricane. A very hot one.
France, and pretty much all of the European continent, has seen a heat wave like it’s never seen before here in the middle of this summer. It’s not just Spain, or southern Italy, or Greece — they’re used to high summer temperatures in those places. But central and northern France are not.
Is Paris burning? Why yes, thank you very much — Paris is burning. Well, it was. Wildfires in the Fontainebleau forest south of the capital consumed about 4,900 acres and forced the evacuation of about 1,000 people. Very ordinary summer stuff if you live in Southern California. Never-before stuff if you live in the north of France. Water-dumping planes dove for the first time into the Seine River to scoop it up and douse the flames. Welcome to our world, France.
I know it’s an American hobby to hate on Europe. But we wouldn’t wish this on our worst enemies, and France, do recall, helped us win the Revolution. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.
In Britain, from where I currently write, the national weather agency says that more than 2,700 people in England and Wales have died from heat-related causes in recent heat waves. London is not supposed to need air conditioning, either. Now it does. What a massive infrastructure project that is going to be.
Here in Edinburgh, it’s about the only place that’s safe from the situation — 68 degrees and lovely, the high for the day, at 1:10 in the afternoon. I just walked out on the terrace of this restaurant and spoke with a Swedish mom and her son enjoying a beer together. She’d brought him here as a 30th birthday present to get out of the heat — the heat of Stockholm.
Normal changes in the temps, variants that the world has seen ever since the Little Ice Age? There’s where you would be wrong. It was 101 degrees in Germany — in June. The government drily noted that “temperatures of this intensity have not previously occurred in Germany.”
The maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change, the Met Office, Britain’s weather service said of the May and June heat waves that killed about 550 people: “Both events were record-breaking due to the impacts of climate change.”
Here, unlike at home, politics doesn’t enter into people’s beliefs about what’s behind this unprecedented situation. The official stance of the Conservative Party is the same as that of Labour and the Greens: We did it. Because we did.
We broke it; we bought it. It’s not in our nature to give up. Let’s do something about it.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com