Earth is burning up — it’s time for us to grow up as a species and start to take action

It’s always a great moment when one discovers a hitherto unfamiliar voice, the way I did just recently. “Soon the summer / Now the pleasant purgatory / of spring is over, / Soon the choking / Humidity in the city.” So asserts the speaker in Liam Rector’s poem, Soon the City.

And indeed, the northern hemisphere is heating up, gearing up for summer. Those of us who live “up” here are beginning to worry, just as we do when winter comes along and we have reason to believe that it is going to be unkind.

Spring and autumn may very well be the only seasons no one complains about. One is life forcing its way out of torpor, and the other is life knocking on torpor’s door. As I type these words, the city of Paris – where I’m writing from – has reached 24°C afternoons, a slow climb from one day to another. I’m starting to dread a heatwave that I feel is headed straight towards us.

Heat in a megalopolis is like coldness in a rural village, where there’s no infrastructure to block the wind: both types can be unbearable, depending on where one is. I grew up in Qoaling in Maseru, Lesotho, and I still remember the deadening cold of Lesotho winters – even at some of the country’s lower altitudes. Qoaling sits at 1,775m. The lowest point in Lesotho is 1,400m above sea level, hence the monikers the Mountain Kingdom and the Kingdom in the Sky.

Paris, by contrast, lies mostly around 35m above sea level, with Montmartre – one of its picturesque hills – rising to just 130m. But when cities in these northern hemisphere countries warm up, they really do heat up. And when they cool, they drive the mercury as low as it can go.

As is often the case, Robert Frost forever has a knack for coming up with just the words to either instruct us or stir our thoughts into action. His poem Nothing Gold Can Stay reminds us that “Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour.”

If you’re wondering why some of that is so, well, when the northern hemisphere leans towards the sun – like it does around June (Paris now) – it gets more direct sunlight, which makes it summer there. At the same time, the southern hemisphere backs away from the sun (Maseru now), so it gets less-intense sunlight and hibernates into winter. About six months later, things flip.

Sure, the seasons have always had their way – summer’s heat, winter’s chill – but these days, climate scientists tell us that it’s not just nature calling the shots. More and more, we’re seeing changes in the climate that don’t line up neatly with the calendar we’re used to. These shifts aren’t just seasonal oddities; according to observation, they’re signs of something deeper. And let’s be honest: we’re much more than a small part of the reason.

Human activity – think cars, factories, power plants, mass farming – has been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow. And those gases don’t just float around harmlessly. They trap heat, exactly like the glass walls and roof of a garden greenhouse, slowly warming the planet in ways we have now been experiencing year after year. The evidence is plastered daily all over the internet. But not everyone “believes” science.

Think of Earth – our home – as you would your own body. When you get a fever, even just one or two degrees, you feel it. You get sick. Well, the planet can run a fever too. And right now, it’s burning up. We can measure this in all sorts of ways: with thermometers, satellites, rising sea levels and the rapid melting of glaciers – those massive, slow-moving “rivers” of ice you find near the poles, sliding down slopes like frozen snails.

And here’s the thing: it’s not just a handful of scientists raising the alarm. This is global. There’s overwhelming agreement, close to 98%, among experts worldwide. The tiny splinter of dissent is mostly people with shady funding or questionable motives, kind of like the old “doctors” who once claimed cigarettes were good for you. What we’re seeing today is Earth showing clear signs of illness, and pretending everything’s fine won’t bring things back to normalcy.

You don’t have to understand all the science involved, the same way you don’t have to be a doctor to know when you are running a fever. We’ve got the tools to measure what’s happening, and they’re all pointing in the same direction: we are actively baking the planet and reaching, or have already reached, the tipping point, portentously referred to often as the point of no return. Why is a good chunk of us not doing anything to curb this trend?

It is in part because of people like former US Republican Senator James Mountain Inhofe, who was a rabid climate change denier, for one. During his Senate tenure Inhofe became known for rejecting climate science – and famously bringing a snowball to the Senate floor to dispute global warming. The confusion probably stemmed from misunderstanding the difference between weather and climate. There are many like him.

Do you recall that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) where Indy, in full panic mode, is screaming “We are going to die!” while spikes are closing in and Kate Capshaw is shrieking her head off because there are insects all over her? Well, these days, it feels like half the world is channelling that same energy – only instead of booby-trapped temples, it’s climate reports, melting ice caps and northern hemisphere heatwaves in February.

And the kicker? It’s probably not us who are going to die (not instantly, anyway), but our kids and their kids. I can’t help but wonder if they’ll grow up looking at us the way we look at people who thought lead paint and asbestos-filled walls were swell ideas. What will the descendants of Inhofe think of his snowball stunt?

National Geographic reminds us that “since the Industrial Revolution – an event made possible by the use of fossil fuels in everything from power plants to transportation – Earth has got hotter. 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first year Earth’s temperature surpassed 1.5°C (2.7°F).”

Nevertheless, I have varsity friends in the US who still insist that it’s nothing but a hoax and believe we’ve shifted from saying “global warming” to “climate change” because the latter, they claim, is a safer term and something that has always been happening. Unfortunately, it all reminds me of a saying, attributed to Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.”

Frost lived a long time ago, when we were beginning to more than realise just how much damage we had already been inflicting on the only home we’ve ever had.

If we don’t grow up as a species and redress our predicament, soon his “Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour” will lose much of its open charm, and the planet’s hardest hue to hold will become impossible even to touch, as its early leaf becomes a flower no more. It is impossible not to wonder what it will finally take for us to wake up and start acting, the way we did to fix the ozone layer.

In the Seventies and Eighties, scientists found that the ozone layer was thinning over Antarctica, mainly due to human-made chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons and halons used in aerosols and refrigerants. They rose into the stratosphere, where UV light broke them down, releasing chlorine and bromine that destroyed the ozone. The problem was worsened by Antarctica’s cold conditions, which sped up ozone depletion.

Well, we huddled up and fixed that problem. DM

Rethabile Masilo is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho who lives in Paris, France.

The brown-veined white

By Rethabile Masilo

Many butterflies in Ladybrand today,
as many as snowflakes in a blizzard,
they bend the grass under them
with gasps from their wings: nature
just showing us how a storm might start.
They dance upon red colonial roofs
along the way; trees, born in the years
of blood-letting, their arms still bent up
in defeat. We slip onto a black road
toward Bloemfontein, grocery on the back-seat –
this road, this thin strip of road, is the tape
that measures distress. I push the car harder
up the hillside into our mountains and head left
toward Maseru, the other side of the river, where surely
the same butterflies had earlier begun their flight
that morning: and a few filter still among willows
that border the river, like the last falling fluffs
of a pillow fight, the smell of summer in the air.
Cicadas come out from their trenches: December!
We watch those last white butterflies disappear
north-east toward Ladybrand, fluttering,
and then continue home to be with our own family.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.