Climate change: The kind of heat we can’t take

In Seville in Spain the sky was endless blue and yet it was raining – raining birds. They were falling by the dozens from above; baby birds throwing themselves from the ovens of their nests.

It was still early June, the little swifts were too young to fly, but the unseasonal heat forced the issue: it was a case of jumping or roasting. Now the not-quite-fledglings lay on the streets, hundreds of them, dead and dying as rescuers rushed to scoop up the survivors – panting, dehydrated – from the burning pavements.

In Taiwan, the authorities shortened summer daytime waiting periods at pedestrian crossings to prevent heatstroke.

In continental Europe, the latest fashion accessory is a handheld fan as seen on the Dior catwalk, and now increasingly at play out of necessity in summer’s hotter-than-ever European cities.

In my house in the Cape, where I currently am, it’s midwinter, yet in the night I was awoken by the summertime zing of mosquitoes. I dug out the fly swatter and killed seven before I went back to bed. I have never known mosquitoes here in the wintertime. The neighbours concur.

A province over, people are on a different kind of load shedding: water load shedding. Further along still, in KwaZulu-Natal, catastrophic flooding is becoming the new normal.

In Sydney, Australia, unprecedented floods are almost an annual event.

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Meanwhile in the US – second biggest polluter in the world behind China, although its population is a quarter of China’s – the Supreme Court curtailed the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to limit harmful emissions from coal-fired power stations.

Only weeks before, 100 million US citizens were asked to stay indoors to escape unseasonable record-breaking highs.

A study in May showed how the latest south Asian heatwave was made 30 times more likely due to human influence.

In March, both the south and north poles hit new record high temperatures. However, in happier news a group of Arctic polar bears seemed to be adapting to an extent to their diminishing sea ice. They weren’t quite making chilled martinis and soaking up the rays, but they weren’t dying either, so that’s a win.

Maybe climate change isn’t going to be so cataclysmic after all… Although not dying seems like a pretty low bar.