Solastalgia for summer

There’s a dark joke about this year’s extreme temperatures that has been haunting me for weeks, this article begins: This is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. Soumya Karlamangla, who covers California issues for the New York Times, reports that the asked som climate scientists “Is every upcoming summer going to be even hotter than this one?” The short answer was: Yes, generally. One puts it particularly compellingly:

“The climate that your children are going to experience is different than any climate that you have experienced,” Paul Ullrich, a U.C. Davis professor of regional and global climate modeling. “There was no possibility in your life span for the types of temperature that your children are going to be experiencing on average.”

We've been staggering breathlessly from one new record to the next record, each effacing from the record books the apparent finality of the last. This dark joke offers some unwelcome perspective. "Hottest" is different from "hottest yet," and offers a false promise that things might return to some earlier normal. It shifts the perspective to the future we need to plan for, from whose vantage these times, which seem unbelievably hot to us, will instead look cool. This shift in perspective is upsetting, but in a good way...