At this point in July, with another heat wave sharpening its teeth from the coming week, we can already say that high-latitude blocking patterns are altering the forecast for the summer. And they are altering it for the worse: meteorologists already expect the situation to be fairly persistent.
The data are worrying, but as meteorologist Mercedes Martín says that we must “prepare for harsher summers” it does not mean that “we have to resign ourselves.”
“There has never been as much information available as there is today, and yet it does not always manage to translate into how we think, feel, or make decisions,” she explained to National Geographic Spain. And there is some truth to it: “it is not to diminish the urgency of the climate crisis, but to prevent the message from getting trapped forever in the same tone of alarm.” But what does that really mean?
There are reasons for alarm… Of course there are. Spain has warmed by about 1.75°C since 1961, roughly twice the global average, and summer is advancing dangerously toward 2°C.
Since 1975 there have been 12 heat waves in June, and half of them are from 2015 onward: if between 1975 and 2000 there were two, between 2001 and 2025 there were ten. The March 2022 heatwave left PM10 peaks of 3,070 µg/m³ in the southeast. In other words, about 68 times the WHO’s daily limit. And, if that weren’t enough, the Mediterranean is warming at an especially rapid pace (up to three times faster than other bodies of water).
The problem is that we grow used to this exceptionalism far too quickly.
And yes, “problem” is the word. This has long ceased to be something for 2100. June 2026 was the second warmest June since 1961, with an anomaly of 3.2°C, and the MoMo system estimated around 900 heat-attributed deaths in that month alone. In France, those figures have been much worse.
In other words, we are not talking about projections or statistics: we are talking about people dying every year. Our inability to translate climate data into policies that are accepted and palatable costs lives.
And what do we do? Because, as Martín notes, the permanent catastrophic tone saturates, fatigues, and sometimes paralyzes more than it mobilizes. But on the other hand, lowering the volume just when the numbers worsen (the worst wildfire year in three decades, the second warmest June, hundreds of deaths, etc.) can be read as reducing urgency.
The answer is simpler than it seems. Because, whether we like it or not, the big problem of climate communication has never been the dramatism. It has been the enormous gap between knowledge and action. Although there are many things we can intuit, the truth is that climate change is putting us in an unprecedented lane.
To the difficulty of predicting anything related to the weather, these uncertainties add up and generate the sense of making policy in the blind. But that isn’t true: that France could see temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius in the coming weeks is exactly the kind of thing we would expect. It may not reach that figure, that’s true: but within it lies almost everything.
We just have to realize
Image | Benbaso – Xataka
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