Forget about global trends, forget "unprecedented events", this isn’t rocket science, I’ve seen the climate shift myself, in my lifetime, and I’m not even that old. It’s difficult to imagine how people elsewhere aren’t seeing the same, like we aren’t inhabiting the same reality somehow?

In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.

The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.

Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.

We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.