Conn Hallinan:

This year’s floods and heat waves are but a fraction of what awaits the continent—unless a growing climate mobilization succeeds.

It’s been a rough summer in Europe.

On August 18, several dozen people gathered around a patch of snow in Iceland to commemorate the demise of the Okjokull glacier, a victim of climate change. Further to the west, Greenland shed 217 billion tons of ice in the month of July alone.

Not long before, Paris reached 108.7 degrees on July 25, and normally cold, blustery Normandy registered 102 degrees. Worldwide, July 2019 was the hottest month on record.

Meanwhile, melting Russian permafrost — which makes up two-thirds of the country — is buckling roads, collapsing buildings, and releasing massive amounts of methane, a gas with 10 or more times the climate-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

And in the U.K., some 1,500 residents of Whaley Bridge were recently evacuated when a dam — overwhelmed by intense rainfall that pummeled northern England — threatened to break. The rains washed out roads and rail lines and swamped homes and businesses.

Ever since coal was partnered with water to generate steam and launch the industrial revolution, Europeans have been pouring billions of tons of atmospheric warming compounds into the planet’s atmosphere. While scientists were aware of the climate-altering potential of burning hydrocarbons as early as 1896, the wealth generated by spinning jennies, power looms, and drop forges was seductive, as was the power it gave countries to build colonial empires and subjugate populations across the globe.

But the bill is finally coming due.

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