We Live In A Political World: #202 / "Fake News" About Heat Waves Everywhere

Click Here For The Blog In The Original

The cover of the July 21, 2025, edition of The New Yorker is reproduced above. It's HOT in the Big City! The latest edition of the magazine is "hot off the press" in more ways than one.

It's hot in India, too, by the way, as reported by The New York Times. To quote from the July 1, 2025, article that I have just linked, "In some parts of the country [India], daytime temperatures have hovered close to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit."

Those who have followed my earlier recommendation, and have read Kim Stanley Robinson's book, Ministry For The Future, will probably remember that Robinson's story begins with a heat wave in India. As I recall, the heat wave Robinson describes (in what is, so far, a fictional account of what global warming is doing) killed something like two million people, in just a few days.

Our current president, as we all must know, has opined that what the scientists have called global warming is just some sort of "fake news," an "evil" plot by Democrats and environmentalists. More offshore oil drilling, oil and gas development in the Arctic, and similar efforts to boost the use of fossil fuels of all kinds is a prescription for disaster (at least if you believe Kim Stanley Robinson, or take seriously flash floods in Texas and the kind of heat waves, almost everywhere, memorialized by The New Yorker's cover).

If we believe Robinson, when the death toll reaches a million, or more, in a single incident, THEN the world will start doing something about global warming. Think about Robinson's title (I like to think about grammatical construction, personally). His "Ministry," which is intended to mobilize resources, worldwide, to confront global warming, is a ministry "For" the future, because if we don't have a worldwide, coordinated and collective response to the forces we have put in motion there isn't going to be a future.

Old as I am, I continue to be "future oriented." If you'd like to get out ahead in favor of the inevitable need for a massive human response, coordinated globally, along the lines that Robinson writes about, you should definitely consider how you can free up some of your personal time to start working towards a solution. This is, essentially, what Greta Thunberg* has done. How much of her personal time has she mobilized?

I'd say, maybe, about 100%, in her case, just based on what I read. If you can't do that much, you can still start figuring out what you can do - and you can start doing it!

Really, that's a choice for all of us. We can either dedicate our lives to perpetuating the possibilities that human life can continue on Planet Earth. Or, we can forget about all that, and call the reports of global warming, and its effects, "fake news."