Global Warming: A Personal History

      It was a little after 9 p.m. in Paris. The temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit. For those of you following along in the metric system, that’s 32.2 Centigrade.

      The forecast for the next day was 99 degrees. For the day after, 100 degrees. For the day after that, 102. For the day after that, way back down to 100.

      This is how hot that was, just this past week: the French government—the French!—banned the consumption of alcohol at public events, in Paris and through most of the country.

      Paris’ temperature records go back centuries. Before 2019, there had been one, just one, occurrence of the temperature ever hitting 100 degrees Fahrenheit, back in 1947. Since 2019, that level has been reached six times. In just the last six years, Paris has accumulated a quarter of all its 95F or higher days that had been recorded over more than a century.

      It seems impossible to believe, or at least for me, mainly because when we lived in Paris we spent most of the summer—the summer!—freezing our asses off.

      Granted, it was a long time ago, almost 50 years. One day that summer of ’77, according to the records, the thermometer hit 86 degrees. Most of the time, the temperatures were in the 60s and 70s, occasionally in the 50s, and we padded around our ground floor apartment, in the summer, wearing sweat pants and sweatshirts.

      And we were still cold. Granted, it was a damp, cold apartment but all of Paris felt pretty much that way.

      That summer, we rarely went to cool ourselves off with ice cream at Berthillon on the Ile St. Louis. Sometimes, instead, we’d go to the nearby Au Bon Marche department store, just to wander around so we could warm up.

      Like Bon Marche, Paris stores were warmer but not particularly well-ventilated. In general, Paris was not—is not—a city equipped for temperatures of 100 degrees. Few places have air conditioning, although more are getting it. Few even have fans, particularly true back then. The metro, even when the temperatures are not elevated, usually feels sticky and airless, both the stations and, particularly, the trains themselves. When the temperatures rise, in an airless, overheated metro car in the overheated summer, it’s a problem.

      It’s not the worst problem, of course. In the first recent great heat wave, in the summer of 2019, almost 400 people in the Paris region died from heat-related causes. Each summer since, more have perished.

      Anyone who has paid any sort of attention knows that global climate change is not—as one particular American politician has said again and again—a hoax. The planet is warming, whether we acknowledge it or not. We see it in the increased intensity of storms. We see it in the heat waves and droughts and rising sea levels. We see it in the migration of people from what are becoming increasingly unsustainable areas to more temperate ones.

      Except the more temperate ones, the places like Paris, are heating up quickly. “April in Paris” may soon be July in Paris. And that seems next to unbearable, particularly to those of us who wistfully remember a city of light, not of heat.