It’s Just Two Degrees

We cannot let this fever run its course

Every day outside the window at which I sit and work, my neighbours’ girls roll past on their scooters, going up and down the pavement, often giggling, sometimes quite determined. The eldest, being taller, spots me at my desk, and often slows down to peer in, smiling shyly when I look up at her before rolling away. 

I am blessed at this little window, watching the world roll on like those girls on scooters. I see elderly women hunched with age walking past dragging trolleys full of vegetables; boys racing past on scooters, yelling as they pass their friends. I see people leaving the building opposite with their dogs who scatter the neighbourhood cats. I have watched the trees grow shaggy, green tops that bristle in the wind. I see and am seen, having recently discovered that it is not just the little girl who has spotted me, but also one of the employees at a shop I frequent. We laughed as he mimicked me talking into my microphone or bashing away at my keyboard. When I was gone for a few weeks, more than a few people in the neighbourhood asked where I had been, and how long I was staying. Like the little girl who scoots past me every day, I have become a fixture here, where life rolls on but stays the same, and it brings me deep joy to see it, to be it, to laugh about it. 

Yet, every day, I think about the things I know that will change. I think about how the little girl and her family will cope in the heat in their small apartment, I think about the green shaggy tops of the trees withering to brown, I think about empty shelves, I think about cars disappearing from the city and the neighbourhood cats having nowhere to shelter. I think about energy black-outs and water shortages and militarised police. I think about violence. I think about community. I think about how life will roll on, but faster as the days look different to how they are now. 

It is hard to explain what a two degrees celsius increase in the temperature will do to the planet because two is such a small number. But the last ice age only changed the global temperature by half a degree. Half. When I talk about two degrees, I am being optimistic. 

Words are obviously failing us because we understand two to be a small number. Words are obviously failing us because no matter what we say, things don’t change. Words are obviously failing us because we need to know something in our bones to make sense of it. 

When I was a small child I experienced a terrible fever. I was with my grandmother, a nurse, and remember wailing from the pain through the night. I have a vague memory of the doctor arriving late into the night. The next thing I remember is being lowered into an ice bath by my calm grandmother who was desperate to bring down the raging fever. And I remember, as she lowered me, begging her to let me out because, no matter the heat, the cold, too, was awful. 

My temperature climbed up to 40 degrees celsius that night, a 2.5 degree increase that almost killed me. Had the ice bath not worked—and marginally at that— I would have been rushed to hospital. It was just 2.5 degrees—such a small number. 

The planet, like our bodies, exists in exquisite balance within a safe operating space. Raising or lowering the temperature by small numbers can kill. The planet is an extension of our own bodies, or we an extension of it—tell me, could you survive a permanent 2 degree increase in your own temperature? Let alone 3? Or 4? Could you survive the pain? The exhaustion? The confusion? Unable to do what you once would so easily? Always right at the edge, at the brink—tipping.

I know the story of the night of my fever, but remember, vividly, looking up at the concerned face of my grandmother as she lowered me into the icy water, tears streaming down my face, convinced in that moment I was being utterly abandoned to pain, unable to understand the discomfort of the water was the only treatment that would soothe the greater pain ravaging my small body. I was shocked, terribly, by her betrayal, that as I tried to claw towards the woman I felt safest with, she held me in the cold tide which lapped at my waist, telling me to lean back. I refused, I clawed. She held, steadfast, for a few minutes, long enough to help, and when she released me I leaped to her, betrayal and abandonment forgotten and forgiven in a moment.

There are children among us, riding scooters on the pavement outside my window, peering in to spot me frowning at this computer screen. She smiles, shyly, and I smile back, and think of the world she will know. I think of the heat and the confusion and exhaustion and living at the brink—tipping. We must change. We must. It will be uncomfortable and so antithetical to industrialised modernity that to some it may feel like a betrayal, but we must bring the temperature down, we must brave discomfort to do the right thing and save the smallest of bodies from the global fever ripping around the world, from wildfires to fascism. If the heat is not yet unbearable, it will become so; imagine two degrees in your own body. Imagine living that way. Now let the cold water flow.  

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