Heat

"What's 37 Celsius?" Hortense's instant message asked.

            I Googled the word "Celsius" and found a conversion table. "It's 98.6," I told her.

            "Help," she wrote back. "I'm melting."

            " Tu es fondue ?" I inquired. I had just learned the word "fondue" in ballet class, where I was told that it means "melting," though I had always thought it was merely a Swiss dinner-party dish from the 1970s.

            Hortense did not respond. My daughter does not encourage my pitiable efforts to parle français . She remarked that there is no air conditioning in Paris. "Not even in grocery stores," she added.

            "Poor pumpkin," I said, secretly finding it hard to feel sorry for someone who is fondue in Paris.

            The fact was, I was melting too. It was the hottest day of the year so far, maybe of the century, and the heat showed no signs of breaking. A little thunderstorm had passed through but stayed only long enough to tantalize us, then moved on.

            When I lived in England, my body constantly craved heat. Our damp stone cottage had very limited heating, and even at the height of summer, the temperature rarely went over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which most people seemed to find unbearably warm, maybe because the only cold drinks you could buy in England at that time were in fact hot. Though there were many things I loved about living there-- The Guardian ; the BBC; the quiet green of my village--I was happy to get back to the weather of Maryland, where one never had to wear wool in July.

            But had I known that global warming was going to turn all of Europe into a tropical paradise, I would have opted to stay there. When I visited England the summer before last, the air felt balmy and delicious. Paris may be oppressive in the heat, but for the British Isles, global warming looks like great news.

            At least, until we all die.

            During a heat wave, the best place to be is in a movie theater. I was probably the last liberal in America to see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth , the perfect cinematic choice under the circumstances. I was expecting to find it incredibly depressing, and I did, for the first 98 minutes--but for that final two minutes, it was uplifting. Al seems to think that if we all cut our carbon dioxide emissions by driving hybrid cars and planting deciduous trees, we can solve the problem of potential catastrophic climate change as handily as we took care of that hole in the ozone layer (which, I confess, I had not known we'd repaired). The idea that there is something we can do as individuals to offset this problem is a heady one--and the movie's unspoken inconvenient truth is that if Al had become president in 2000, he, though merely one person, would have cleared all this up in his first term.

            But the fact is, Al is merely a movie star at this point, and what is also inconvenient about the film's truth is that battling global warming is antithetical to the business interests that dominate our current government. The oil companies with whom Bush and Cheney have been in bed since early in their careers are not anxious for Americans to go out and buy themselves hybrid cars, even those manufactured by failing American auto manufacturers. They probably wouldn't mind our planting deciduous trees, as long as we didn't burn them for fuel.

This is why it was so important to them to defeat Al Gore--so important that it was necessary to have Bush declared winner by the Supreme Court, hushing up the recount results that clearly indicate that even after all the chads had been hung and the voters hornswaggled by butterfly ballots, stricken from voter rolls, and intimidated, Gore still won Florida. The man in the movie is, inconveniently, the real winner of the 2000 election.

Is Gore right about global warming?   As he points out in the movie, defenders of the corporations whose interests lie in continuing to emit carbon dioxide have polluted the discussion with pseudo-scientific disinformation. As with most subjects since the Bush administration's rhetorical paradigm began to dominate our discourse, it's difficult for the layperson to make any sense of the barrage of alleged facts. For the Bush administration, the phrase "inconvenient truth" appears to be a redundancy, as it devotes all its efforts to controlling the information flow through the news media, an all-encompassing and very successful project marred only by the occasional live microphone.

But Al's computer models in the film are very persuasive, and scientists seem to agree with him. And to the casual observer, sweltering in a Parisian fourth-floor walk-up or here in Maryland, where the heat index today is 105 degrees, things are feeling kind of toasty. As I idle my car in the big parking lot that is I-95 at rush hour, all I know is that it didn't use to be so damn hot here.

When I was in fourth grade, I read a short story from The Twilight Zone in which everyone on earth was dying from either excessive heat or cold--I forget which. Luckily, however, it turned out that this was all a dream--but when everyone woke up, it turned out that in reality, they were dying from excessive heat (or cold--I forget which). All the kids in my school who had read this story debated the relative merits of dying by freezing or boiling, and we argued heatedly, as it were, until we got bored and moved on to discuss whether we'd prefer to be blind or deaf.

For me, it was no contest: I was firmly allied with the forces of boiling to death. I always hated being cold--and growing up in Chicago, I was cold a lot--and freezing to death sounded like the worst fate imaginable, whereas heat--something I associated with summer, and being out of school, and splashing in the filthy waters of Lake Michigan--even excessive heat, seemed relatively appealing.

But lately, as record-high temperatures spread across America and across the ocean into my daughter's tiny Paris apartment, where her rescue-cat Chachi sprawls on the floor, unable to move for fear of working up a sweat, boiling has begun to seem like a terrible way to go, too.

Meanwhile, the Middle East, home to fossil fuels, is heating up. Would that have happened under President Gore?   We'll never know. But it seems likely that if things don't improve, one way or another, we will all be fondue .

See http://an-inconvenient-truth.com/whatyoucando.html

No comments have been posted to this article.

Want to post a comment to this article? Click here.