Liar, liar, your pants (and the Earth) are on fire
What the UK's record-breaking heatwave tells us about our post-truth reality.
The line between fact and fiction is beclouded in our post-truth world. Fringe voices are amplified and the cult of personality tries to bend the arc of history; not towards justice or hope1, but towards fear of equality - and misplaced dreams of reviving a mythologised past (that never existed).
Darren Cullen, a British illustrator, highlighted this dynamic with his ‘EVERYONE IS DEAD’ spoof headline of a scorching hot day in the UK. Life’s imitation game was on show in July 2022 in the actual Sun newspaper. But instead of a skull we see an attractive woman sunbathing. And British deputy PM Dominic Raab encouraged people to “enjoy the sun” ahead of the brutal heatwave.
As the UK braced for that 18-19 July heatwave this year, the right-leaning newspaper the Daily Mail took aim at ‘snowflakes’ and those it viewed as scaremongering on its front cover of 19 July. Of course print newspapers bring you yesterday’s news tomorrow, which means there’s something of a lag once editors have had time to report on what has actually happened, conveniently forgetting their lies from the day before.
By 20 July, after the UK recorded temperatures of 40.3C, and large parts of the capital went up in flames, the Daily Mail had revised its view from ‘melting snowflakes’ to ‘Nightmare of the wildfires’.
Although the scenes of multiple grass fires in London was shocking to see, it could be considered more shocking because in simplistic terms the climate catastrophe is ahead of schedule. Two years ago the Met Office created a ‘plausible’ weather forecast for the year 2050. For even the most sceptical among us, an overlay of this scenario on the temperatures the UK posted on 20 July offer a credible perspective that the future is here. And that future of elevated temperatures will have severe consequences for the way land is managed, for farming2, for the allocation of resources for rescue services3, how are children are schooled4, and for transport infrastructure56.
Yet critics still point to the heatwave of 1976 as evidence that the events in July 2022 are nothing out of the ordinary. But the overwhelming evidence shows this is just wrong (see above). Meanwhile newspapers on the right of the political spectrum will continue to peddle lies when it suits them, as will politicians.
Perhaps it will take a personal tragedy to change minds: say a climate change denialist’s house burning down?7 Until then, all we can say is the world is on fire. And so are their pants.
Barack Obama, on the eve of his election as president in 2008, said that [we can put our] “hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day”. This was a riff on Martin Luther King Jr, who said four decades earlier that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/local-news/live-updates-huge-blaze-tears-7354430
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62232654
https://inews.co.uk/news/education/uk-heatwave-schools-announce-closures-ahead-forty-degrees-weather-1746484
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62234461
https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2022-07-18/flights-diverted-as-heat-melts-airport-runway
I wouldn’t wish such misfortune upon anyone.