Summer Madness
Updated: 2 days ago
As a brutally hot summer in Europe comes mercifully to a close, I’ve been feeling more clear-eyed about the climate crisis. It’s probably going to be more unpleasant than I’ve imagined, and I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for tougher times to come.
What I find most striking about the present moment, though, is how distinctly I can see much of the world I grew up with vanishing, just as a new one, full of promise and peril, emerges in its place. The impacts of climate change this summer have been more drastic than in all my previous summers, and at the same time, I’m seeing exciting solutions and new technologies appear all around me. It’s all pretty dissonant, in a way that I don’t think gets much acknowledgement.
Rather than offer a prescription for what we should do, I wanted to reflect for a moment on the strangeness, the sadness, and excitement of the time we’re in.
Scenes from a scorcher
Somehow, 2026 wasn’t the hottest summer in recorded European history. That title belongs to 2022. It sure as hell felt like it though, and due to a major drought, it seems to have been the most damaging one in hundreds of years.
My LinkedIn feed is filled with posts from climate researchers tallying one heat and drought record after another. Driest year since records began, hottest June, hottest July, first 40C day in this or that place, and tens of thousands of heat-related deaths. I try not to let the algorithms rope me in too deep. Real life is plenty.
Beyond the heat itself, I am personally witnessing things I would’ve considered crazy ten years ago: Alpine summits bare and black with absolutely no snow. Glaciers on borrowed time. Palm trees suddenly appearing all over Switzerland, Germany, and England. Swimming in the Rhein at 26C. Forests shedding their leaves in July. The haze. Lizards having the time of their lives. Parched lawns. Futile attempts to block out the sun at offices. Heat alerts all summer long. People caring a lot (or in my case maybe too much). Other people not caring at all.
The ship is slowly turning
Despite some grim observations, I fundamentally do not believe that we, or this planet, are totally doomed because of climate change. Maybe I’m too influenced by positive messaging, or maybe I just hate doomerism, but it’s hard not to be at least a little optimistic watching so many climate tech solutions that were rare just a few years ago become common.
I see rooftop solar everywhere now. My mum sent me a photo from the Danish coast of wind turbines the size of skyscrapers. Those electric buses that I wrote about with such excitement just 2 years ago are now in every city I go to, at least in Europe. So are electric cars, and my office is surrounded by electric trucks. I just watched a video of an electric plane flying for the first time. European railways are having bumper years.
Beyond my own anecdotes, there are some really encouraging data points out there.
For the first time, solar power led global energy growth last year, providing 75% of new electricity generation worldwide in 2025. This is incredible stuff! This technology was considered an expensive lark 20 years ago. I suspect we are fast approaching a world in which solar is the main source of energy.
I’m seeing signs that the deployment of home-scale batteries is starting to get real. Battery prices have fallen by 90% in the last two years (again, amazing!). Australia seems to be leading the way. 1 in 25 homes there installed batteries in the first year of a government subsidy programme last year. This is really encouraging because even in countries with great solar resources, like Spain, fossil fuels are still widely used to provide power when the sun isn’t shining. Widespread battery deployment looks like it’s going to start to change that.
My favourite stats show how the EV industry is really starting to cook: EV sales grew from 20% of the global market in 2024 to 25% in 2025. Encouragingly, EV sales are taking off worldwide, including in places with weak government support and bad charging ecosystems. Five years ago, essentially no one outside rich countries bought EVs, but emerging markets are now matching the EV sales rates of developed countries. 40% of cars sold in Vietnam last year were electric. In Thailand it was 25%, in Turkey 20%, and in Brazil 10%. The Philippines jumped from 2% to 10% last year alone.
Trends are more important to me than individual good-news stories, and what I see in these statistics is that we are actually starting to turn the ship in the right direction, albeit a little late as we sail into a storm. Sometimes I wish I could’ve been alive 50 or 100 years ago to experience a cooler world, and to shred some epic snowfalls, but increasingly, I wish I could be alive in 100 or 150 years to see all these trends play out.
I don’t like where we are, but I’m excited by where we’re going
Overall, I am experiencing climate change as a pretty even split of sadness, stress, and optimism.
I’ll miss the old world and the old climate. I’ll miss snowy winters and days like this. I’ll miss wearing a sweater on a crisp summer evening. I’ll miss the rhododendrons and lilacs that will probably vanish from Switzerland.
I know that it’s going to be rough for the rest of my life. I know I might witness the end of the glaciers in the Alps. I know that despite the positive trends, we’re going to have to adapt to heat, drought, and fire.
I also believe strongly that humanity will figure this out. Most people, myself included, seem to only really solve their problems when they get bad enough. I expect climate change is no different, and I think we’re entering a phase in which the problems will become bad enough for enough people to drive real change.
In just the last few years though, humanity has assembled all the tools to make the necessary changes, and these are out in the real world now. What a time!
