The hottest day in history
A heat record: July 3, 2023, was the world’s hottest day on record since weather records began in 1880, the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) announced.
But the record lasted only one day; it was already a bit hotter on July 4. “This is not a milestone we should be celebrating,” says British climate scientist Friederike Otto. “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”
In recent weeks, the U.S. has experienced an intense heat wave. In California, temperatures rose to as high as 49 degrees. So did Mexico, Canada and North Africa. Scientists blame climate change, but also El Nino.
Climate protection is health protection
The consequences: Burning forests worldwide, global water shortages and record heat in the oceans. In India, the healthcare system is collapsing. In China, more than half a million people die every year from poor air quality. Germany is sweating this summer and the flood damage in the Ahr valley two years ago amounted to over 80 billion euros. All harbingers of much greater disasters to come, say climate scientists. What kind of world are we leaving our children and grandchildren?
But in the summer of 2023, Germany is having a party fight over heat pumps, which have long been taken for granted by our Scandinavian neighbors. In Finland, almost 70 percent of houses have a heat pump, in Germany five percent. CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD are still resisting the heat turnaround. Although climate science has known for a long time that there can be no energy turnaround without a heat turnaround. And it is also clear that climate protection is health protection.
Already 30 years ago I showed in the ARD and in many books that Germany and Europe can create the hundred percent energy turnaround by 2035. It is not the renewable energies that are in short supply, but the time we have left for the turnaround. The sun alone sends us 15,000 times more energy every moment than the entire human race consumes today. The world is full of renewable energy.
The truth is: Since then, all governments have slept through the solar energy turnaround, the regenerative heat turnaround and the ecological transport turnaround because of pressure from the old energy companies. No wonder young people today, who still have their whole lives ahead of them, are getting stuck in the streets out of desperation.
We today’s parents and grandparents are the first generation to have lost our breeding instinct. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be burning the future of our children and grandchildren. Economy, society and politics think too short-term. We built nuclear power plants so that two generations would have cheap energy. But 33,000 generations have to live with our nuclear waste, because it radiates for a million years – a priceless bill.
The rapid switch to renewable energy is our last chance. We can still do it. The beauty of it is that the sun and wind don’t send us a bill. They are gifts from heaven. The energy transition is still feasible until 2035.
Source
Franz Alt 2023 / Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
