Climate catastrophe movies, like “Waterworld” and “Snowpiercer” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” are a large enough subgenre of sci-fi that they’ve come to be called “cli-fi.” Because Great Big Weather invites amazing visuals, these movies often look as if they spent a lot more money on special effects than they did on scientific advisors – and I don’t claim to know what’s impossible, but their pace of events and their “who could have seen this coming?” plot devices often seem as if math and physics did not get much time in the writers’ room. Then again, sometimes real life says “Artistic license? Hold my beer!” – and we get a week like what they’re having in western Europe.

I don’t regard the BBC or the World Health Organization as alarmists, so when they bring us a statement that “more than 1,300 excess deaths…since 21 June [are] linked to high temperatures in Europe” then we need to pay attention. At The Observer, the massive ironies are noticed with comments like “Last week was London Climate Action Week. It was also ‘London climate in your face week’” – with follow-ups like,

For anyone who has spent the past 10 days in an air-conditioned cave, a recap: record temperatures closed schools, delayed trains, caused hospital appointments to be cancelled, gave the London Ambulance Service its busiest day ever in terms of life-threatening emergencies and forced climate conference organisers to cancel a session on extreme heat because of extreme heat.

The “inconvenience” of the truth, shades of Al Gore Jr.’s now 20-year-old non-fiction movie, is making for contentious debate. Comparisons to another movie, “Don’t Look Up,” are abundant, with various constituencies either rightly or wrongly being stereotyped as simply not wanting to see what’s there to be seen. The tension between short-term (the time frame of elections) and long-term (the time frame of The Real World) is apparent when The Times headlines an essay with the admonition that “The climate payoff is decades away – families are paying the price now” and the subhead, “The hidden cost of net zero is not something that struggling households should have to bear.”

One could argue that this misrepresents, though, the actual choice that is being made in this moment: as aptly framed at Europinion,

The issue is often presented as a choice between continuing to drill the remaining reserves, or accepting higher household energy bills. But this is a false binary. The actual choice is between investing in sustainable, long-term energy infrastructure, or locking ourselves into dependence on a dwindling resource whilst further contributing to climate change.

That “dwindling resource” point needs to be made in language that non-engineers and non-economists will find persuasive: something like, “Every next barrel of oil will cost more than the one before; every next acre of solar panels or next array of windmills will cost less than the one before. How much longer do you want to do what you’ll soon wish you’d stopped doing sooner?”

Climate change conversations weren’t always this culture-clashy. Again from Europinion, this summary and comment:

There are many reasons why climate consensus has disintegrated over the past decade. Economic stagnation, the cost-of-living crisis, geopolitical instability and growing political polarisation thanks to emerging fringe parties have all played a part in distracting from long-term objectives. But climate change does not disappear when the news cycle moves on.

For the big picture of what’s so extreme that it might not be viable as cli-fi, even though it’s actually happening right now, there’s a comprehensive piece at CarbonBrief that’s almost overwhelming to read at one go. Bullet points include

• “Temperature records have toppled in multiple countries”
• “What felt like a freak weather event to grandparents in 1976 will become the new normal for their grandchildren.”
• “Climate change is unequivocally to blame” (referring to a rapid-reaction analysis from the non-profit World Weather Attribution)

and finally, in a pointed criticism of mainstream media coverage, “Your happy and clickable ‘kids in the swimming pool’‚ ‘dogs in a fountain’‚ ‘family eats ice cream’ photos to illustrate news reports about the heatwave are journalistic malpractice.” Well said.

As observed by Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian, “Given the desperate need for economic growth, I understand why net zero can seem like an unaffordable luxury – and when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the looming threat, people will find something else to talk about. But look up.” This isn’t just happening on a movie screen; it doesn’t end when credits roll.