If you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, you’re aware of massive forest fires raging in Western North America and Europe this summer. It appears as if the world is on fire.
In an important sense, the world is burning, in two related ways. In the United States, as of this writing, there are 572 forest fires covering 4.4 million acres, mostly concentrated in the western states. British Columbia is experiencing 109 active fires, nearly half of which are burning out of control. So far this summer, fires in the U.S. and Canada have burned 25% more land than the 10-year average, according to national wildfire centers.
This summer, Europe experienced two unprecedented wildfires in France and Spain, and fires have also raged in Greece and other nations. Fires are also raging in Indonesia and Australia.
If you’ve managed to see video of wildfires, you know that the living things in these forests are being burned alive. Tens of thousands of people are evacuated from their homes, which are often totally destroyed. The courageous firefighters, too, can suffer from profound health issues, even death for their efforts. Fires also spew carbon and toxic pollution into the atmosphere.
But the world is also burning up from unprecedented heat waves over the past several years. You’ve probably heard of temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern and southwestern U.S. It’s not unusual to hear or share complaints about the heat and humidity we’ve experienced here in New Hampshire this summer, with a heat index rising over 100.
Several years of record heat waves around the world are but one product of global climate change — along with melting ice caps and glaciers; rising sea levels; warming oceans; severe droughts and more extreme storm weather like torrential rains and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and the like. Indeed, as forest fires increase, greenhouse gases increase, heating the planet, producing extreme weather events like droughts which themselves increase the spread of wildfires.
In one sense, the wildfires seem far away from our lush green New Hampshire trees and forests. Yet, in addition to our hot and humid summers, we have also been experiencing a long-term regional drought, which, along with rising global temperatures, has deeply impacted our farms and trees, to say nothing of a growing epidemic of ticks and other pests.
But there is another sense in which we are linked to wildfires here and around the world. We are citizens of the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options. Climate change is a profound political issue that calls on us to act together to realign our politics and our economy.
How we do that is the challenge.
Despite Donald Trump’s continual harangue that climate change is a hoax, only 15% of Americans believed climate change is not happening, according to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change and Communication poll. Sixty-nine percent believed it is happening, and 60% or more believed it is causing droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat – before this summer!
Yet, an article written by “Don’t Look Up” film director Adam McKay in the Aug. 6 edition of Current Affairs focuses on “The Gargantuan Lie that is Collapsing the World’s Climate.” In McKay’s words, the lie is “told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually … even by ourselves, to ourselves.”
He sums up that lie as “when it comes to climate change … we have more time.”
The climate has already passed the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Accords. With the likelihood that this year’s El Niño will push next year’s average warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius, it will likely cause agricultural failure and food shortages, leaving us staring at the catastrophic 2-degree increase we are currently hurtling toward.
As Robert Hunziker wrote of McKay’s article, climate change is an “existential threat to all forms of life sooner rather than later, meaning current lifetimes.”
We are clearly facing many crises — horrible wars, unaffordable health care, inflation, income and wealth inequality, fascist-like repression and targeting of vulnerable peoples. How can we cope with the impending doom suggested by the well-established scientific data on climate change, especially when elected officials virtually ignore the climate crisis and mass media treat critical events as isolated crises?
We may feel tempted to block or ignore messages like these, and powerful corporate interests are perpetually encouraging us to do exactly that. We may despair and grieve for our planet, and we can try to “do what we can” as individuals. But we must act politically as well, or we — and especially our children and grandchildren — are doomed. We must demand action from public officials; oppose data centers and boycott corporations that profit from climate damaging activities; join with others around the world and, ultimately, talk to each other.
More than any other crisis, our shared global climate has the potential to unite us.
Ted Morgan is a retired professor of political science living in Tamworth.