It is warm today, and therefore the screen is full of it.
A thousand stories about the same thing, and a weather map glowing so deep red it looks like a notice from the realm of Hades, a colour scale where twenty-six degrees is painted as if it were the very entrance to the underworld.
But stay with the map for a moment, before you even read the number on it.
For red is not a temperature.
Red is a decision. The same number can be coloured in a calm, cool blue, and it can be coloured in blood and fire, and the choice between the two was made before you got there. You think you are looking at the weather. You are looking at a mood someone has laid over the weather, and the mood came first.
Fifty years ago it was also warm. In August 1975 a heatwave lay over the country for a week, and the thermometer at Holstebro reached 36.4 degrees, a number that to this day stands as the highest ever measured in Denmark. Warmer than anything we have felt since.
And back then no one drew a map that looked like hell. Back then it was a lovely warm summer. People dragged the television out into the garden, drove to the beach and remembered it with joy. The same sky. The opposite story.
And it is worth stopping and noticing that.
The weather did not change meaning and narrative by itself. It was assigned one. And you only assign a natural phenomenon a meaning if you want something from the person who is to read it.
Let me stop here. For around here tinnitus and alarm bells have started in several places, among several of you reading along.
"What is he saying!?? Is he a CLIMATE DENIER!!??"
No. I am not. So let me give you, who think I am, the best card I can give you straight away, for I have no need of it.
Yes, the curve points upward. Yes, the very warm days have come slightly more often, yes it stands both in DMI's own archive, international databases and I am not withdrawing a word.
But that is precisely why what I am writing about becomes interesting - if you can keep yourself and your central nervous system's automatic response calm. Just for a little moment.
For the change that is actually being talked about, the shift of an average temperature over half a century - that is, across my lifetime the last 52 years for example - that is by definition the one thing NO human being can feel. NONE of us can feel the difference between eighteen and nineteen degrees. No one goes outside and registers that the annual average has crawled a degree and a half since great-grandfather's time.
For. The average does not live in the skin.
It lives in a spreadsheet.
And yet it is the skin that is called to the witness stand every single time. EVERY TIME a summer day is warm, your arm must suddenly testify to something your arm is completely blind to.
Let me try to cut right to what I am saying.
The warmth you can feel - on a day like today - is borrowed as confirmation of a change you CANNOT POSSIBLY feel. And then notice which days are allowed to testify at all.
A warm day counts as proof. A cold winter counts as weather. When only one kind of day is allowed into the courtroom, the case becomes impossible to contradict, not because it is true, but because the door is closed to everything that could speak against it.
It might be bearable if it stayed with adults. But it does not. For the fear moves. It travels from a red weather map into an adult psyche, further into the institution, and from there down into a child who has no defences. A child who is still learning to tie its own shoelaces is told that the planet is burning beneath it, and that it has no future. And then it spends its childhood gluing itself to a road, destroying a painting, marching toward a doom it was given before it managed to wish for anything itself.
That is not enlightenment. That is a burden placed on a back that cannot carry it, and which did not ask for it. And people use warm lovely summer days to intravenously install that story deep into the psyche of children. And into you.
And the cruelest thing is that most who carry it onward do so in good faith. They think they are warning out of love. Therefore it is no use hating them, for none of them sit in the middle lying on purpose. They see the red colour on weather maps and the stories written about warm summer days all year round, which are supposed to prove something none of us can feel.
What needs to be disarmed is not a person. It is the story that can take a number no one can feel, and transform it into an anxiety a child can feel in its entire body.
For they have taught the child to fear the sky.
And that is what I cannot be silent about.
Fine if you yourselves are afraid of summer.
But please keep your fear at home with yourselves.
Give Denmark back the lovely green weather map.
Thank you.
❤️🔥🪽
....
(the weather map is of course fabricated as a fantasy. Such variation we probably will not see again - those of us who can remember it looking like that once - before there is no more money to be made from the weather being broken. But it does feel very nice with a bit of nostalgia here in the middle of the end of the world 😊🤷)
Enjoy the sun, Friday evening and the weekend, friends.
You have a life. It would be foolish to let The False Light from a screen destroy it. If it is too hard to distract from its stories - then turn it off.
Life is a Mystery in all its incomprehensibility for the one who lives with open eyes and heart. The task is to teach children this - above everything else. Even the climate. ❤
