Por Michael Leonardi
 |
Photo by Tobias Rademacher |
This is a summer of extreme heat that refuses to end. Record temperatures have fallen one after another across Germany, Czechia, Poland, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy and beyond. Germany recorded provisional highs above 41.7°C. Czechia reached 41.9°C. Poland broke a century-old mark. Denmark logged its hottest day since records began in 1874. Italy has faced successive waves, with temperatures repeatedly climbing past 40°C in the center and south, red alerts covering much of the peninsula, and electricity demand hitting record levels for July as air conditioning pushed the grid to its limits. Hundreds of millions of people have endured days above 35°C. Nights brought little relief. The World Health Organization linked more than 1,300 excess deaths to the early phase of the heat alone. Later provisional figures covering only part of the continent already point to tens of thousands of excess deaths across the back-to-back waves of 2026.
Scientists have been unambiguous: heat of this intensity and earliness would have been virtually impossible without human-driven climate change. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth. What was once called a once-in-a-generation event has become annual. The scientific consensus has been consistent for decades. The 1.5°C guardrail of the Paris Agreement and the repeated warnings of the IPCC have been treated as optional language rather than binding limits. Governments have continued to expand fossil infrastructure, delay meaningful emissions cuts, and subordinate climate policy to growth, military spending, and short-term political calculation. The result is not a surprise. It is the predictable outcome of ignoring what the science has long made unavoidable.
The social effects are immediate and unequal. Schools without air conditioning become dangerous. In Milan and other Italian cities, nursery and pre-school classrooms have recorded internal temperatures of 32–36°C. Parents have organized collections to buy portable units. Teachers and children work and learn in conditions that would fail any serious occupational-health standard. Across Europe, many school buildings were never designed for sustained extreme heat; relatively few are equipped with cooling. Lessons are shortened, outdoor activities cancelled, or buildings closed. The burden falls hardest on children in underfunded public systems.
Electric grids are already stretched to the maximum. In Italy, successive heatwaves drove national electricity demand to record levels for July, largely from cooling. Localized blackouts hit Rome, Naples, Turin and parts of the Milan area. Across the continent, high demand coincides with reduced efficiency of thermal plants and, under drought, constrained hydropower and river-cooled generation. The same heat that forces people to run cooling systems makes those systems more expensive and less reliable.
Beyond Europe, the same heat intensifies suffering in places already subjected to genocide and mass displacement. In Gaza, where a genocide is unfolding under bombardment, blockade and systematic destruction, nearly a million people live in tents or overcrowded shelters. Temperatures inside the tents turn them into ovens. There is little or no electricity for fans. Clean water is scarce — many families survive on less than six liters per person per day, far below emergency standards — after the deliberate destruction of wells, pipelines and desalination capacity. Heatstroke, especially among children and the elderly, has become routine. Food spoils without refrigeration. The sea, contaminated by sewage from collapsed infrastructure, offers only polluted relief. Extreme heat here is not a separate crisis; it is another weapon in a campaign that has already destroyed the conditions of life.
In Sudan, where genocide and mass atrocity continue amid civil war, extreme heat has killed people through heatstroke in the Red Sea state and elsewhere, while power outages and water shortages leave displaced families with almost no means of cooling. In Iran, temperatures in western and southern cities have repeatedly exceeded 50°C, with some locations recording among the highest readings on the planet. Drought and heat compound each other, stressing already fragile water and energy systems. In these places, as in parts of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, extreme heat does not arrive as an isolated meteorological event. It arrives on top of war, blockade, destroyed infrastructure, and the collapse of basic services. The body’s ability to regulate temperature collapses when there is no shade, no water, no power, and no functioning health system.
Two forces accelerate the crisis while remaining largely outside serious climate accounting: endless war and the explosive growth of data centers.
Militaries are among the world’s largest uncounted emitters, responsible for an estimated 5.5 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Assessments of Russia’s war on Ukraine put cumulative emissions in the hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ equivalent — from combat fuel, landscape fires, destroyed energy infrastructure, and the carbon cost of future reconstruction. Studies of the assault on Gaza estimate more than 30 million tons of CO₂ equivalent, the overwhelming majority tied to rebuilding what has been systematically destroyed. These figures are almost certainly underestimates. Military emissions remain largely exempt from the transparency required of other sectors. War and genocide are not only machines for killing people; they are machines for accelerating planetary breakdown.
At the same time data centers have become major local and regional heat sources. They already consume roughly 1.5–2 percent of global electricity, with Europe’s share measured in tens of terawatt-hours annually and rising rapidly under the pressure of artificial intelligence. Servers generate enormous quantities of waste heat. Studies have found average surface temperature increases of about 2°C near data-center clusters, with localized spikes far higher. Cooling systems demand vast amounts of water or electricity precisely when heatwaves already stress grids and droughts reduce available water. Only a tiny fraction of the waste heat is reused. The rest is dumped into the atmosphere or into already stressed water systems. Political leaders court hyperscale investment while treating the energy and water demands as largely external to climate policy.
The result is a feedback loop. Climate change produces more extreme heat. Extreme heat increases the energy required to cool data centers and the strain on grids already damaged by war or locked into fossil dependence. Wars and genocides lock in further emissions through destruction and reconstruction while diverting political attention and resources from the systemic transformation required. Governments that expand military budgets, approve new data-center campuses, and continue to miss or weaken emissions targets are not passive victims of the heat. They are active participants in the conditions that produce it.
This is ecocide in plain sight. It is not an abstract future threat. It is the air people are breathing, the nights that never cool, the excess deaths that accumulate week after week, the classrooms that become ovens, the grids that fail under load, and the tents in Gaza and Sudan where the heat becomes lethal because everything else has already been destroyed by genocide and war. The heat is not evenly distributed in its effects. Those with air conditioning, private transport and secure housing suffer least. Those without — the elderly living alone, outdoor laborers, children in overcrowded schools, refugees, the urban poor, and the displaced under bombardment or blockade — absorb the cost in their bodies.
There is no technological shortcut that leaves the underlying drivers untouched. Ending the wars and genocides that burn carbon and destroy the capacity for low-carbon reconstruction is a climate necessity. Subjecting the energy and water demands of data centers to the same scrutiny applied to other heavy industries is a climate necessity. Treating military emissions as real emissions, not national-security exceptions, is a climate necessity. Honoring the scientific consensus and the targets governments themselves adopted, rather than treating them as decorative language, is a climate necessity. Anything less is an agreement to keep living inside a summer that never ends.
The records will keep falling. The death counts will keep rising. The only question is how long societies continue to treat the predictable as the surprising.
Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário