IT WAS CODE RED FOR HUMANITY
From extreme weather killing hundreds to climate anxiety plaguing children, the last year taught us a lot about the severity of the crisis, writes Lucy Siegle
in september, temperatures rose 18°C above average in Greenland and, for the first time, it rained instead of snowed on the vast icecap. It was so unexpected that scientists at the summit station had no instruments to measure rainfall. That sums up 2021 in climate terms: unexpected, unprecedented and worse than feared.
If you were lucky, your climate reality remained low-key. Perhaps you were struck by the great pasta shortage that hit in October – which transpired because the Canadian wheat-growing belt that supplies our macaroni was clobbered by extreme weather. Millions were not so lucky.
In parts of London, flash flooding devastated homes; in the North, Storm Arwen left thousands without power for days. Low-lying towns in Germany hit the news as waters burst the banks in the worst natural disaster in decades, killing 170.
From Storm Ida across four US states (where 45 people died) to the 150 deaths after Cyclone Seroja hit Indonesia and East Timor, the tragic tally of lives lost due to extreme weather kept ticking upwards. We’ll probably never calculate the animals killed by the wildfires that engulfed parts of Greece and Turkey last summer.
This was the year we learned what a ‘heat dome’ is: a weather system that traps hot air. Residents of Lytton, Canada, suffered a heat dome when temperatures rose to 50°C. China’s worst sandstorm in decades saw people wear goggles and masks, the air choked with sand. By July, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres described the climate crisis as ‘code red for humanity’.
In September, the first study into climate anxiety was published, having surveyed over 10,000 young people around the world. ‘I grew up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom,’ one Philippines respondent, Mitzi Tan, told researchers. What was clear was the sense of betrayal felt by young people following inaction from adults in power. Greta Thunberg called out the rhetoric of political leaders with the phrase ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ It became a slogan on many signs displayed by activists at COP26. Flight data showed over a 100 private jets ferried the likes of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson to the UN Climate summit.
Was this a good COP or a bad COP? Cheerleaders point to the fact that the Glasgow Agreement was eventually signed by all countries and that the text includes the first ever mention of fossil fuels. But it comes nowhere near the task of stopping the rise in global temperatures at the ‘magic’ 1.5°C. If 2021 was code red for humanity, 2022 needs a 24/7 catastrophe siren.