People fear hell. Regardless of whether they are religious or not. The fear of eternal suffering or cataclysm seems to be subconsciously embedded in man like some transgenerational trauma. In the list of phobias, there are even two terms used for the fear of hell - hadephobia and stygiophobia. Is it extremely hot or extremely cold in hell? The Bible claims that hell is a "lake of fire." Whether we are talking about the Old or the New Testament, it is very hot, excruciatingly hot, unbearable in hell.
Many interpret such a description of hell as the geography of the origin of the holy Christian book, and even today people often say "it's as hot as hell". If we rely on two major literary works that dealt with the subject, Dante's Inferno in the Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, it turns out that hell is icy. In Dante, the last, ninth circle of hell is a lake of ice, and Lucifer himself is covered in ice. In Milton, however, heat is associated with heaven, light and God, while cold, wind and storms are associated with the devil. Whether hell is hot or cold, a man will have a terrible time there no matter how you turn it. Extreme, unpleasant. They will suffer and be tormented forever. When you are very afraid of something, a common and human reaction is denial. Throughout history, manipulations have been well suited to the primordial human fear of death, to insecurity, to the cognitive dissonance that occurs in moments of crisis.
Humanity is on the highway to climate hell, is the sentence with which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres began his speech at the last UN climate summit in Egypt late last year, and not long after, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the same. Guterres did not paraphrase Dante, Milton or the Bible, but the Australian hard rock band AC/DC, but that did not make his warning less serious, perhaps only closer to those who have been turning their heads for years. The fight for a planet where life is possible will take place in the next decade, Guterres said. "We are fighting for our lives and losing, and our planet is approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on our way to climate hell with our foot on the gas. We can sign a joint climate solidarity pact or a collective suicide pact."
When NASA scientist, climatologist James Hansen appeared before the US Senate Energy Committee on June 23, 1988, few could have known, at a time when the world as we knew it was collapsing politically with the end of the Cold War, that Hansen's testimony in public debate and strategic assessments of the future to set the term and phenomenon known as - global warming. Hansen, who studied the previously known climate models, concluded everything that is known, proven and what we are talking about today.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hansen said after three and a half decades: "The world is heading for a super-warmed climate not seen in the last million years before human existence because we're damned fools for not heeding the warnings."
The record temperatures that warmed the world in the past week, from Europe, through America to China, led Hansen to the conclusion that either scientists did not communicate things more clearly or we simply elected leaders who are not capable of a more intelligent response. "Superstorms like this are just a hint of the kind of storms my grandchildren will experience. We are heading towards a new reality, and we knew it was coming. Looks like we have to taste it to believe it."
I don't know if it is taught in school that we have long since entered the Anthropocene, in which major changes will and are occurring in a short period of time. For the last ten thousand years or so, the world existed in the Holocene, a stable interglacial period in which the temperature varied by only one degree, thus enabling life as we know it. Stable temperature and sea level, along with predictable seasons, enabled the development of civilizations, and parallel to them diverse plant and animal habitats. A new geological interval, the age of man or Anthropocene, was coined 23 years ago by chemists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, based on geological evidence of the impact of accelerated industrialization and nuclear activity on the country's development.
Neither climate is only weather, nor is climatology meteorology, but people react, understand or deny the fastest through the known and visible. According to the report of the European Environment Agency, Croatia is one of the red spots in the Mediterranean basin and belongs to the group of three European countries with the highest cumulative share of damages from extreme weather and climate events in relation to the gross national product. After a period of unprecedented heat, a storm of equally unprecedented proportions rumbled through Slovenia, Croatia, BiH and Serbia yesterday, leaving behind human victims and devastation. Croatia, a small European country from the periphery that has experienced two major earthquakes and a pandemic, is now once again adding up the consequences of the unexpected, even though, because it is stated in the guidelines of the European Union, it recently introduced an early warning system for precisely such cases.
Adaptation of urban planning, agriculture, fisheries, restoration of soil and habitats of plant and animal species, waste management, food production, all this will accelerate and seek new forms of management of societies and communities. The United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Portugal, Holy See, Canada, France, Argentina, Spain, Austria, Malta, Italy, Bangladesh, Maldives, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and Japan are countries whose parliaments have declared a climate emergency, he did that and the European Parliament.
Climate security is also key to understanding instability in and around Europe. The planet in ecological overstrain destroys the economic, political, financial, social fabric, from the local to the global level, and, according to Olivia Lazard, opens the way for systemic rivalry, race for resources, impoverishment of living conditions, conflicts, everything that we are witnessing today. Such systemic vulnerability, Lazard claims, is at the heart of our collective security. The European Commission published the first joint statement on climate security a few weeks ago. "Climatic extremes, rising temperatures and sea levels, desertification, lack of drinking water, threats to biodiversity, pollution, all of these threaten human health and can cause large displacements and migrations, pandemics, riots and conflicts." This sentence is nothing new. Hints of hell in the past decades have been woven into many announcements, conference conclusions, international documents, policies, action plans. In the past decade, autocracies like Russia have shamelessly used fragility as a weapon in the fight for resources, food and water at the expense of global security. But our primordial fear of hell often turned our heads the other way. Although the leaders of the Pacific countries lamented and asked for help at every climate summit and UN conference, even though we ourselves somehow understand that something is different, despite the cognitive dissonance and despite the fact that "it was hot a few years ago" or we remember "even worse storm when we were at grandma's at the sea". In the era of hyper-industrialization, hyper-urbanization, existential threats to the country's biodiversity, and not yet very provable data, many still play only their own, very selfish card. Among others, those who systematically spread misinformation about climate change. Knowing that people are afraid of hell, it is easiest to say that it will not happen to them.
Can we as humans, just part of the time journey of the planet and the universe, be quick and stop time, find technological solutions to slow down the processes that we ourselves have contributed to. How can you even write about climate change without it being a part of every aspect of our lives, food, drink, energy, economy, infrastructure, education, safety, health, from physical to mental. Climate change also determines how we will treat our communities, villages, cities, how we will treat other states and nations, and how we as individuals will treat each other, especially those we do not see as part of us, if you will - tribes.
As the poet Aneta Vladimirov writes:
Hell is good even when it's hell.
You can't kiss hell away.
There is one and the same substance in the turtle's shell,
human nail, nettle and ungulate horns.
We overlooked that substance.
We didn't learn anything about her.
We didn't know.
Ignorance is bad even when it's comfort,
and comfort is the worst,
comfort is the future.
Bonus video:
