Worst heatwave ever?
Really?
I am writing this from Vienna. I lived through it. I do not use air conditioning for health reasons, so there is no artificially chilled refuge for me. There are electric fans, open windows at the right time of day, cold drinks, and simply getting on with life.
It was hot.
Nobody sensible would deny that.
But we never even touched 40°C. Most places hovered around 37°C and 38°C. That was enough for television crews, newspapers, websites, and social media to erupt into a frenzy. “Hottest ever.” “Unprecedented.” “Historic.” The same familiar vocabulary rolled out on cue.
Except there is one awkward detail.
I still have newspapers from 2016 and 2017.
Their front pages screamed exactly the same thing, except the temperatures were 41°C in 2016 and 42°C in 2017. Those, too, were supposedly the hottest ever.
I have the papers.
They exist.
So I find myself asking a rather simple question.
How exactly did 38°C become hotter than 42°C?
What happened in less than a decade?
Where did those earlier headlines go?
How did they vanish so completely that almost nobody seems to remember them?
The answer has very little to do with weather.
It has everything to do with narratives.
Most people no longer inhabit a world of accumulated memory. They inhabit a perpetual present, a carefully curated bubble in which today’s story is all that exists. Yesterday is forgotten because remembering it would make today’s certainty rather inconvenient.
Facts are not merely unwelcome in such an environment.
They become obstacles.
Obstacles are removed.
Contradictions are quietly erased.
Memory becomes selective.
And each new event is presented as though history began only this morning.
This is not unique to climate politics. It is a feature of societies that have become wealthy enough to devote enormous amounts of time and energy to imagined emergencies while largely forgetting the practical concerns that occupied every previous generation.
History is full of examples.
Once a civilisation has solved enough of its material problems, a growing class emerges that no longer worries primarily about producing food, heating homes, or earning tomorrow’s meal. It begins instead to construct elaborate moral and ideological worlds in which symbolic battles gradually replace practical ones.
The Romans did it.
The Byzantines did it.
Countless prosperous societies have done exactly the same.
Reality eventually intervenes.
It always does.
Fantasy remains affordable only while prosperity pays the bills.
Once enough people struggle to heat their homes, fill their shopping baskets, or put enough calories on the table, priorities change with astonishing speed. Grand narratives suddenly lose their appeal when ordinary life becomes difficult again.
We are watching that process begin.
But we are nowhere near the end of it.
Not yet.
There is still enough comfort left for narratives to flourish, enough prosperity left for memory to be optional, and enough distance from genuine hardship for yesterday’s headlines to disappear without anyone asking where they went.