Of course they refuse media inquiries now.
Silence, at times, is the loudest confession. When those who have never shied away from microphones suddenly discover a passion for privacy, it is rarely because they have run out of words. It is because the words available to them would no longer survive daylight.
In a sense, the retreat is an admission. Not necessarily of malice—though that cannot be excluded—but of awareness. They always knew the scaffolding was fragile. The massaged statistics. The “adjusted” temperature baselines. The apocalyptic sea-level projections that stubbornly refuse to materialize in the manner advertised. The theatrical insistence that we are burning up while ordinary people quietly invest in thicker jackets and sturdier boots to survive winters that seem increasingly unimpressed by computer models.
And then there is the heating bill.
Energy grows more expensive partly because the weather refuses to cooperate with utopian expectations—and partly because we have layered society with crushingly costly measures designed to “fix” the climate. Measures that do not meaningfully alter the trajectory of the planet’s thermodynamics but certainly alter the trajectory of household finances.
As if the Sun, that indifferent nuclear furnace 150 million kilometers away, were awaiting policy guidance from Brussels or Berlin before deciding what to do next.
But now it is cold.
Cold is inconvenient. Cold disrupts the script. Cold forces awkward questions. Cold does not pair well with the word “emergency” when the emergency was supposed to involve heat.
So they withdraw. They decline interviews. They avoid cameras. They do not wish to be filmed offering explanations that smell faintly—or not so faintly—of improvisation. Because once the public associates a face with visible evasion, with rhetorical contortions, with explanations that feel like damp cardboard, the damage lingers longer than a frosty morning.
It is tactical silence.
Why speak now, when anything said would require acrobatics? Better to wait. Better to let the season turn. Better to bide time until the first bead of sweat forms on the brow of a passerby in July. When the pavement shimmers. When discomfort becomes immediate and visceral.
Because the public memory is short.
Painfully short.
Most people do not remember last year in detail. Eight years ago may as well be the Bronze Age. The last few summers may well have been milder than those between 2010 and 2020. That is a matter of record. But records are abstractions. Sweat is immediate.
When you are standing in 37 degrees, shirt clinging to your back, air heavy and unmoving, you do not care that eight years ago it was 42. You are hot now. The present sensation overwhelms historical context. You do not consult decade-long averages while wiping your forehead.
This is how narratives are forged.
Not through footnotes. Through feelings.
The human mind privileges immediate discomfort over statistical nuance. It always has. The rational faculty, in most people, is about as developed as gills on a desert shrew. Present, perhaps in theory. Operational, rarely. So the narrative hammers itself into place not by argument but by sensation.
Heat equals danger. Cold equals anomaly. The rest is stitching.
And when summer arrives, the microphones will reappear. The experts will rediscover their voices. The interviews will flow again. The language of urgency will return, polished and theatrical. Winter will be dismissed as “weather.” Summer will be crowned “climate.”
Round and round it goes.
Silence in winter. Sermons in summer.
The cycle does not require consistency. It requires timing. And a public willing to confuse what it feels today with what has been happening for decades.
That confusion is not accidental.
It is cultivated. And it works.