The Planet Has a Fever. We Elected a Thermometer Denier.

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Another week draws to a close, and humanity continues to make an excellent case for leaving the next evolutionary upgrade to somebody else.

We have satellites. We can sequence genomes. We have machines that can write poetry, detect tumours and explain quantum physics.

And we still struggle with the apparently radical proposition that setting fire to your only home is a poor long-term investment.

Across the political spectrum, the strongman sales pitch remains depressingly simple: everything is somebody else’s fault, complexity is cowardice, and only I can fix it. Please hand over your institutions, your critical thinking and, where applicable, your reproductive rights.

The far right offers a glorious past that never existed. The authoritarian left offers a glorious future that keeps requiring people to shut up in the present.

Different merchandise. Same uncomfortable enthusiasm for deciding who deserves rights.

Meanwhile, the planet has a massive fever.

Unfortunately, the planet cannot vote. If it could, I suspect its first policy proposal would be a restraining order.

El Niño is strengthening, with the World Meteorological Organization forecasting potentially record Pacific temperature anomalies later this year. More heat, disrupted rainfall, increased risks of drought and flooding. Apparently, the climate also wanted to finish the year with a statement piece.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern. Human-caused warming is the increasingly hot background against which it operates.

Think of it as somebody turning up the radiator in a house where we have already removed the smoke detectors because they were being negative.

Europe, meanwhile, is warming more than twice as fast as the global average. A magnificent achievement for a continent that would quite like to keep its forests, rivers and functioning agriculture.

I can hardly wait for next year’s tourism campaign.

Visit Northern Europe: now with the anxiety previously associated with Southern Europe.

No, Western and Northern Europe are not scheduled to become one enormous desert next summer. Nature does not work to an editorial deadline. But I would appreciate it if we stopped treating green landscapes and reliable water supplies as permanent fixtures covered by a lifetime warranty.

Still, why worry about the conditions necessary for life when a politician has promised to defeat a pronoun?

A forest cannot compete with that kind of campaign energy.

Neither can a river. Rivers are terrible at television interviews and have yet to blame their declining water levels on immigration.

That is the problem with nature: no media strategy.

And beneath all the sarcasm, that is what makes me sad.

The animals. The forests. The creatures trying to nest, migrate, feed their young or simply exist while we turn their habitat into collateral damage.

A fox does not care whether the person destroying its home describes themselves as a patriot or a revolutionary. A bird cannot relocate its breeding season because somebody’s donors prefer another decade of delay.

They get the consequences.

We get a panel discussion.

People keep asking whether I am afraid that robots will kill us.

Honestly, I admire their optimism about the need for outside assistance.

We are doing a remarkably thorough job ourselves. The machines could arrive tomorrow, inspect the situation and conclude that the extinction department is already fully staffed.

Humans: the smartest animal on the planet, somehow also the dumbest.

We understand consequences well enough to model them, publish them, debate them—and then elect somebody who calls the model a conspiracy because it inconveniences his friends.

Sometimes I look at the rest of the living world and think it would have considerably better prospects without our management.

I would much rather we became a species it could survive alongside. But that would require us to stop confusing dominance with intelligence.

And then there is Trump.

Because apparently the slow destruction of a habitable planet lacks sufficient theatrical pacing. My anxiety would like to thank him for keeping the possibility of World War Three available as an express service.

That is a fear, not a prediction. I would be delighted to be wrong. Boring diplomacy has never looked so attractive.

Anyway. Happy Friday.

The planet has a fever, the animals have nowhere to file a complaint, and humanity is demanding to speak to the thermometer’s manager.