An elderly gentleman wrote me that there had been hot and dry summers before.

Is that right?

Andrew Frey

Freelance author in the science section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Old people rightly remember extreme summers with temperatures reaching 40 degrees.

But the accumulation of summers like this since the late 1980s has never been seen before.

A hot summer used to be followed by a slump, but that hasn't happened in the meantime.

We almost got into a new climate regime.

What are you up to?

In the number of hot days and tropical nights, the frequency of which has increased massively in Central Europe.

The summer of 2003 was still a complete runaway, a black swan.

Until then, you had the feeling that you were on the safe side technologically and thanks to developments in the agricultural and energy industries.

In your book “Climate and Society in Europe.

The last thousand years” you speak of a “return of vulnerability”.

What do you mean by that?

In the last three centuries, through innovation and as a result of globalization, societies have largely freed themselves from the dictates of the natural climate.

In contrast, earlier agricultural societies were heavily dependent on the weather and climate and suffered from extreme events.

So they set up warehouses and granaries to be prepared for bad times.

They had a memory for crises and catastrophes, passed on such events from generation to generation, held processions and marked high water levels on houses.

They wanted to understand the weather and its extremes.

But this awareness was slowly being lost.

Why?

The Little Ice Age with its extreme weather events came to an end in the middle of the 19th century.

Also, from about 1870 to 1985, a so-called Disaster Gap occurred, during which there were few floods.

And then you benefited from the technical improvements: Agriculture flourished in the last three centuries thanks to synthetic fertilizers.

In addition, the invention of the steam engine and transport made it easier to compensate for grain in shortage areas.

There were also medical improvements.

It all resulted in the society feeling safe and recovering.

She disconnected from the natural climate and gained the feeling that extremes could be cushioned.

Shouldn't we first assume that global warming wouldn't be so bad?

Ultimately, the experience in Europe was: cold costs money.

Even the very early explorers of the greenhouse effect, such as the Swede Svante Arrhenius, always noted in their publications that the warmer climate after the Little Ice Age is also a blessing.

It wasn't until 1890 that they realized that it was getting warmer.

However, at the latest with the climate models from the 1970s and the evaluation of the ice cores here in Bern, it was clear that warming was becoming increasingly dangerous.

Hans Oeschger and Uli Siegenthaler, pioneers of the subject, had given many lectures at the time, but it was ignored.

The change was still gradual.

Cooling devices help against more heat, it was said at the time.

Now we are smarter.

And yet we are only at the beginning of this new climate regime.

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