Wildfires in East London

 

I remember a joke on The Goon Show (1951-1960) about "earthquakes in East Acton."  Not impossible but rare enough and mild enough to be funny.  Today in London it's 40C (104F) and there are fires burning everywhere.  Not from a baker's oven in Pudding Lane or the Luftwaffe but our new enemy global warming -- tinder-dry grass, stiff winds and people who have not yet learned about disposing of fag-ends.  People who also mostly don't have air conditioners.  Cutting off avenues of escape, the airports were already scaling back service (understaffing) before the runways began to melt.

I'm trying to decide if I want to spend $3.99 to watch the weirdly prescient The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), one of those movies which has slipped through the cracks, possibly because its biggest star is Leo McKern.  As befits its Cold War origin it offers a simple explanation for the heat -- the US and the USSR, unbeknown to each other, have tested thermonuclear weapons at the North and South Poles more or less simultaneously, knocking the planet out of orbit and sending it rocketing into the sun.  In 1961 very few people were saying things like "Hey, what's that hole in the ozone layer?"  It was easier to blame the two big bullies who had supplanted the British Empire as global superpowers.  Now we'd accuse China.  Some of us already have.

Of course, China is suffering, too, and India, and continental Europe and most of North America.  From Lake Mead to the Po River, water sources are drying up.  Crops are dying.  So are people -- more than 1,700 in Portugal and Spain alone.  This will increase the price of food and fuel inflation, which has already brought down the government of Sri Lanka.  The unusual weather extends even to the south Pacific, where winter storms sent fifteen-foot waves crashing into Hawaii and Samoa.  Not normal, say the meteorologists.  What's normal anymore?   Earthquakes in East Acton?

The ever-opportunistic viruses which share our planet have sensed weakness.  In Ghana two people have died this week from the Marburg virus and another 98 are quarantined.  Monkeypox is everywhere in the US and the response has been slow -- there is a vaccine but HHS is only now getting it distributed even to the District of Columbia, which has more cases per capita than any state.  It's affecting sixty other countries, and covid spikes regularly enough to spur the use of a new vaccine, Novavax.  (The announcement that Rep. Bennie Thompson has been diagnosed created some anxiety about the House Select Committee he chairs.)  It looks like this critter is here to stay. 

As I recall, Val Guest's movie begins with Brits enjoying the unusual warmth of an August bank holiday at a time when "English summer" was still something of a grim joke ("Missed it last year, I was shaving").  As the heat persists and increases, people treat it as a prolonged holiday until...maybe I should watch it again.