Heat crisis?
Are we serious?
Has Europe suddenly discovered summer?
I can already see my sixtieth birthday on the horizon, which means I carry well over half a century of memories of Austrian summers. Long before smartphones. Long before social media. Before the internet. Before game consoles. Before endless streaming and twenty-four-hour news channels reminding us every few minutes what we ought to be worried about.
Life was different.
Entertainment, at least by today’s standards, barely existed.
There was no rapid delivery. No online shopping. Living in the countryside meant that even buying a book became an expedition. If I wanted something specific, I had to travel into Vienna, order it from a proper bookshop and then wait—sometimes for weeks—until it finally arrived.
That was simply normal.
Why do I mention any of this?
Because there was almost no reason to stay indoors.
Our lives unfolded outside.
Our mother spent half the summer trying to round us up before darkness fell because the last thing any child wanted was to go home. Morning until evening belonged to fields, forests, bicycles, streams, football, climbing trees and inventing games with whatever happened to lie on the ground.
There was no air conditioning.
Very few people had even heard of it.
You experienced the weather exactly as it was.
When it was cold, you were cold.
When it was hot, you were hot.
And some days it was blisteringly hot.
We walked barefoot across asphalt that became so hot you learned to sprint from one patch of grass to the next. The black tar used to seal cracks in the road softened under the sun until you could press your toes into it. Sometimes it stuck to your feet. The soles of our feet turned black—not just from dust and dirt, but from the tar itself, which stubbornly refused to wash off.
It was hot.
Really hot.
Not occasionally.
Every summer there were days you simply accepted as oppressive because that is what summer sometimes is.
Nobody called it a crisis.
Nobody expected nature to apologise.
Nobody imagined that sunshine itself had become a political event.
What has changed is not merely the temperature.
It is our relationship with the seasons.
We experience the weather less through our own senses and more through headlines, alerts, colour-coded maps and dramatic television graphics. Before we’ve stepped outside, someone has already informed us what we are supposed to feel about the day.
A warm spell no longer arrives as weather.
It arrives as a narrative.
That is a profound difference.
I am not suggesting that temperatures never break records or that exceptional heat waves do not occur. They do, just as exceptional winters, storms and floods always have. Nature has never been perfectly behaved.
What strikes me is something else entirely.
We seem to have lost confidence in our own memory.
Many people now speak as though Europe has never experienced intense summer heat before, as though blazing afternoons, parched fields and uncomfortable nights are entirely new phenomena.
They aren’t.
Anyone old enough to remember life before every moment was documented online carries a different archive.
Not a digital archive.
A lived one.
The smell of hot pine forests.
The shimmering air above the roads.
The taste of warm raspberries picked straight from the garden.
The feeling of bare feet on scorching pavement.
The relief of finding shade beneath an old chestnut tree.
Those memories were never collected as data.
They were simply life.
Perhaps that is what has changed most.
We have become so accustomed to measuring everything that we increasingly distrust experience itself.
The thermometer now speaks louder than memory.
The headline louder than observation.
The narrative louder than the season.
Summer has not forgotten how to be summer.
Perhaps we have forgotten how to experience it.
https://climaterealism.com/2026/07/right-fortune-europes-heat-crisis-is-of-its-own-making/