I’m sure you have all been following the impact and consequences of the heatwaves and droughts in Europe and America. This unusual rise in thermometer readings has caused — and continues to cause — many problems. Let’s list the ones that come to mind:

• Forest fires have become more frequent and more devastating.

• Even healthy and fit people have died from heat-related causes. In fact, the United Kingdom was forced to issue a red alert on the matter.

• Some parts of humanity’s pride and joy — its technological infrastructure — waved the white flag in the face of extreme heat. After temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius, cooling failures occurred in the servers of some major technology companies, short-term outages happened, and some servers were shut down to prevent system failures.

• Rivers and lakes dried up due to extreme heat. And what didn’t emerge from their depths! In Italy’s Po River, a 450-kilogram bomb from World War II; in the U.S. state of Texas, 113-million-year-old dinosaur footprints on the bed of a dried-up river; in the U.S., numerous human remains under Lake Mead; in Spain, the remains dubbed the Spanish Stonehenge, dating back to around 5,000 B.C., in a reservoir lake; in Serbia, the wrecks of German warships loaded with explosives near the river port city of Prahovo — these are just a few of them. Among the remarkable discoveries revealed by dried and receding rivers, however, what caught my attention the most were not those listed above, but the “hunger stones.” These stones, submerged in the Elbe River from the Czech Republic to Germany and dating back to the 1600s, carry a “warning” from the past. Their inscriptions state that drought brings poor harvests, food shortages, high prices, and famine. Some of the stones even bear messages such as “If you see me, weep!”

• Water shortages began to appear in certain regions. Life became more difficult, and the threat of famine emerged.

Our aging planet is experiencing developments that are tantamount to a “red alert.” It is also clear that such developments will continue to increase in the coming period.

You may have read Semih İşevi’s article titled “Our Last Test in the Anthropocene” in Nokta Haber Yorum. If you haven’t, I recommend it. There’s an observation in it:

“In recent years, the melting and disappearance of polar ice sheets occurring much earlier than expected, the increasing strain on threshold values in climate change, the floods, droughts, tornadoes, and extreme weather conditions we are experiencing, have brought us to a time when even past warnings are now considered optimistic, and unfortunately, we are heading toward an irreversible age.”

Semih İşevi is right in his assessment. We are racing at full speed toward the horizon of a night from which there is no return. Scientists, based on current data, use models to predict what surprises the climate has in store for us in the coming period. According to some of these models, large regions of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans in the next century.

However, according to a recent study by the U.S.-based nonprofit research group First Street Foundation, those hard times are not a hundred years away. The organization predicts that in the next 30 years, more than 100 million Americans will be affected by the “Extreme Heat Belt.” It warns that those living in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Great Lakes could occasionally face temperatures exceeding 52 degrees Celsius by 2053.

It’s not possible to say the situation will be much better in our own country. In the Climate Change National Action Plan published in 2011 (although the study is somewhat old, there’s no reason to think the result will be very different), it is projected that the annual average temperature in Turkey will rise by 2.5°–4°C in the coming years, with increases reaching 4°C in the Aegean and Eastern Anatolia Regions and 5°C in the interior regions.

What do you think? Will it be easy to live at these temperature levels?

The strange thing is that in this dark picture the world is rapidly approaching, the sole concern of capitalist thinking remains maximizing profit. I recently read a news story about a group of billionaire businessmen launching an exploration operation (or we could call it a race) for critical minerals and ores beneath the soil exposed by the melting ice sheet in Greenland. The teams assigned for this purpose were reported to be taking soil samples to measure the underground electromagnetic field and map the rock layers below, and conducting research with drones and helicopters. It was also noted that artificial intelligence is being used to determine where exactly to drill based on the data obtained. Well then, good luck with that!

Do you feel a wave of pessimism coming over you? Wait, this is just the beginning! We’re at the start of the road.

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