Greta Thunberg on the extreme heatwave: “This is only the beginning”

An extreme heatwave with temperatures of more than 40 °C is currently battering Europe.

Authorities across Europe has issued heat and health alerts, France has recorded its hottest day ever since measurements began in 1947, and schools are closed to spare students from overheated classrooms. Nuclear power plants are getting shut down or forced to spin down their output because the rising water temperature in the rivers from which cooling water is drawn is simply getting too hot to cool the nuclear reactors. A French nuclear power plant was forced into an “unplanned shutdown” earlier today. And people are dying.

The heatwave follows an extraordinary warm spring in which Europe faced summer temperatures in early spring. This spring, a UN-report was also released which warned that Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating more than twice as fast as the global average.

Speaking about the heatwave, the world-famous climate activist Greta Thunberg told British Metro that “this is what experts have been warning about for decades,” and that it “is unfortunately only the beginning”.

This is what experts have been warning about for decades. We know that the climate crisis is here and now, and not a faraway threat in the future, and those suffering the most are the ones who have contributed the least to cause it.

This is unfortunately only the beginning.

Thunberg continued and criticised both politicians and the media for not treating climate change as “the existential crisis it is”, saying that British leaders have their “heads completely buried in the sand with pockets lined up with dirty money”.

What is most concerning about this is not only that we continuously shatter heat records and destabilise the entire biosphere way faster than models have been predicting, but that it is not treated as the existential crisis it is in media and politics.

The UKs responsibility for the climate crisis cannot be overstated, still its leaders continue acting as if there was no tomorrow.

It’s about time for the UK to repay its climate debt and limit the worst consequences of a crisis people are already dying from, which there is still time to do.

And she’s completely right, you know.