Why do we keep saying “it's always been hot” when it's not true?
A few days of cool weather won't change anything: the extreme temperatures we've recorded, especially in some parts of Italy, aren't a passing anomaly, nor yet another peak in a simply scorching summer. They're yet another sign of a profound, systemic crisis , which the scientific community has been warning about for years as imminent, and which is now exploding upon us, amid extreme heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and power outages . Summer 2025 is by no means an exception. It's the new normal .
It's not hard to realize, unless you engage in that sophisticated form of collective denial that experts call climate change denialism . Temperatures that were once extreme are now the norm. Where once 28 or 30 degrees were recorded, today they reach 40. And in Sicily, temperatures have approached 50. Fifty degrees. A threshold that until a few years ago seemed to belong to the desert.
Yet, punctually, when the climate emergency is discussed, the old mantra recurs: "It's always been hot." Accompanied by a few archive videos or screenshots of weather forecasts from the 1980s. But the point is that it hasn't always been this hot, and especially not in such a constant, structured, or prolonged way.
It's worth recalling a symbolic episode, then. It was 2014 when French meteorologist Evelyne Dhéliat , a well-known face on TF1's weather program, produced a special edition of her forecast set in the future: August 19, 2050. An experiment in scientific communication. The map showed Paris at 40 degrees Celsius, with temperatures reaching 43 in the south of France . A provocation, perhaps, a warning, certainly. But at the end of the report, Dhéliat reassured: "Don't worry, it's just an imaginary exercise." But no. Because today, eleven years later, that forecast has already been surpassed. In France, temperatures have reached 41.6 degrees Celsius. Not in 2050, but now.
It's clear that reality has outpaced our projections. And if we were to repeat that exercise today, truly imagining the climate of mid-century, we would likely—or at least it's likely according to the IPCC studies—be faced with a worse-case scenario. But not for narrative effect: for sheer concreteness. Far from fiction, the catastrophe isn't in front of us. It's beneath our feet.
Weather and climate are not the same thing
And it's crucial to reiterate: weather and climate are not the same thing. The occasional heatwaves that have occurred in past decades cannot be compared to a climate trend that now affects the entire planet and profoundly changes our lives.
A phenomenon before everyone's eyesThe data is there for all to see: accelerated melting of glaciers, rising average global temperatures, altered ecosystems, and the increase in extreme events such as floods, fires, and storms. Seasons are blurring, harvests are declining, and cities are suffering from heat waves that threaten public health.
We're beyond the alarm phase. We're in the time of consequences: the question is no longer whether there will be radical change, but whether we'll be able to manage it. Forget about " Don't look up." Here, the asteroid has already fallen. It left the crater, raised dust, set the forests ablaze. It's pointless to contemplate old predictions that maintain, "In the end, it won't be that different from before."
Luce
