By Ted Glick
It was the summer of 2003. I was employed at the time as the national coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network, working towards, we hoped, a progressive, broad-based alternative to the Dems and Reps. But something happened that summer in Europe which changed my life, leading me to leave that IPPN job a year and a half later in the hope that I could find paying work focused on the climate crisis. What happened that summer to lead to that personal change?
Here is how AI Overview reports it:
“The 2003 European heatwave was an extreme, prolonged, and deadly weather event, with estimated fatalities exceeding 30,000 to 70,000, particularly in France, Italy, and Spain. Lasting from June through mid-August 2003, it featured temperatures 3 to 5°C above average, often exceeding 40°C in Western Europe, causing severe agricultural losses and sparking major wildfires. . .”
I had known at the time about “global warming,” knew it was one of many important issues. But the research I did that fall, the books I read, convinced me that this crisis was much more serious, more imminent, than I had thought that it was. If tens of thousands of people in economically developed Europe could die from an extreme weather event caused in large part by the heating up of the atmosphere, and with knowledgeable people predicting this was just one example of what humankind worldwide would be facing for years to come, even if we did stop burning oil, coal and gas, the fossil fuels whose ubiquitous use is the primary reason for these events, this was clearly a very real, here-and-now existential threat for all forms of life on all of the earth.
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Image source: Public Domain
Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org. More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.