Climate disruption: weather in the American culture wars, the Atlantic engulfs Saint-Louis

1,400 heat records were broken last week on five continentsalert him Washington Post. It’s 41°C today in Islamabad: the capital of Pakistan is suffering from a heatwave, just like Karachi, the economic heart of the country where “the bodies pile up” in hospitals and morgues, title the pakistani newspaper Dawn. “Women, children, the elderly, rural populations and the poor”forced to work or live in substandard housing, “are the most vulnerable to heat”, points out Dawn. Furthermore, 200 homeless people died in New Delhi and the heatwave continues to wreak havoc, indicate the Times of India, Dawn and the Washington Post. Fans and air conditioners have difficulty operating in Mali, “because of power cuts and the obsolescence of its power stations”reports The Journal of Mali, while “the country is suffocating” since April. 36°C today in Bamako, 42°C in Timbuktu. In Greece, tourists have died or gone missing since the mercury soared, note the Greek daily And the Kathimerians, the BBC and the Washington Post. And then, we already talked about it last week, deadly pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia: a final report suggests more than 1,300 deaths among the approximately 2 million Muslims who performed the hajj in Mecca and Medina, under scorching temperatures , raise it daily Asharq al-Awsat. In the United States, 70 million residents experience excessive temperatures, or nearly one in five Americans, specifies the BBC. The British public media, like the New York Timesnow include the entire world in the weather maps offered on their site, in order to monitor climate change.

Presenters take action on climate change and the weather is no longer the neutral ground it once was, explains the New York Times. The 2,000 meteorologists who work on television across the Atlantic sometimes have to take a stand. This is what it does, on WFLA channel in Florida, Jeff Berardelli : “climatologists and meteorologists around the world are frankly astonished by the heat records of the last twelve months”he said, showing a map of the globe with dark red on all the continents, thus translating “record temperatures even in the oceans because of the El Niño phenomenon but above all, because of human activity”. And to show, always with supporting maps, “the carbon dioxide which traps all this heat in the atmosphere”. Still in Florida, another weather presenter Steve MacLaughlin, sur NBC 6 News does not hesitate to give a more political spin to his analyses: last month, after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law allowing his state to no longer take climate change into account when developing its energy policy, the meteorologist from NBC 6 News was outraged, recalling that Florida had suffered “record heat and rain in recent years, but also floods, with an increase in insurance prices.” Without encouraging people to vote for a candidate in the November presidential election, notes the New York Times, the weather presenter Steve MacLaughlin assured viewers that “The most powerful solution to climate change is the one you already have in your hands: the right to vote.”

Weather has become an integral part of the culture wars in the United States: Chris Gloninger, whose New York Times paints the portrait, has had the bitter experience of it. The award-winning television meteorologist moved from Boston, on the east coast of the United States, to Iowa, in the Midwest, to become the weather chief at KCCI, the CBS affiliate in Des Moines. His new bosses were clear: they wanted him to talk about climate change, says the New York Times in another article. But in a state like Iowa where the majority of corn grown is used to produce ethanol – a biofuel presented as environmentally friendlybut which recent research has shown is worse for climate change than burning gasoline – many conservative viewers didn’t like the meteorologist’s analysis at all. Online harassment, death threats. The channel first supported its weather presenter and then asked him to reduce his coverage of global warming. The meteorologist, traumatized, ended up resigning before returning to Massachusetts. Emails still poured in to support him, “letters stamped with flowers and butterflies” that Chris Gloninger kept in a binder, with the feeling of duty accomplished, says the New York Times.

West Africa: coastal towns threatened by rising waters

The Atlantic begins to engulf the city of Saint-Louis in Senegal, where at low tide, a few years ago, a long beach extended enough to accommodate the crowd, during football matches or for dancing in the nightclub “La Chaumière”, tells a Senegalese fisherman at British magazine The Economist. But today, “La Chaumière” has closed. More than 3,000 waterfront residents have had to be relocated to the other side of town as the Atlantic begins to engulf Saint-Louis, nicknamed the “Venice of Africa.” 80% of the city is at risk of flooding by 2080.

Same risk faced by several coastal cities in West Africa: the fate of Saint-Louis is “perhaps a vision of the future”, warns The Economist car “many fast-growing West African cities risk slowly sinking beneath the waves,” such as Lagos, Nigeria, or Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania “which is only protected by a belt of dunes, which can themselves be pierced by waves.” The World Bank estimates that approximately “42% of West Africa’s GDP is generated in coastal areas”while the harvests are also subject to extreme weather phenomena, which is causing the price of raw materials to seize up around the world, note the Washington Post and the New York Times. These West African coastal cities are also home to a third of the region’s population who are at risk of joining climate refugees unless, they stress. The Economist, the Washington Post as well as the meteorologists in the United States mentioned above, that climate risk is not taken into account in policy on a planetary scale.