In early June I was in the abyss. Quite literally. Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley is, at 85.5m below sea level, the lowest point in North America. It’s an eerie place, a huge flat plain covered in blindingly white salt, surrounded by high brown folds of arid rock that trap the killing heat in the basin.
The air is so dry that after a few minutes the skin on your face feels like the cracked salt on the ground beneath your feet. It is as if the atmosphere itself is so thirsty that it is greedily sucking the moisture from your body.
The thing everybody says there is that it seems like you’re on another planet. But what haunted me about the place was that the other planet it felt like was this one – except in the future. It is the Earth we are in the process of creating.
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It’s not exactly lifeless. There is a spring that brings water to a shallow pool, but the water is so salty that it is undrinkable. A species of snail has adapted itself to live in it. But we humans are not like the Badwater snail, and to our eyes this place seems starkly still. There is, as Samuel Beckett might say, no lack of void.
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This void, so cruelly indifferent to humanity, ought to be terrifying. It is pitiless, unforgiving, hopeless. Its literal depression ought to induce a psychological equivalent. Instead the basin is strangely mesmerising. Even, perhaps, restful. The mind is drawn into this great emptiness. Because there is nothing, there is nothing to worry about.
When I was leaving the basin and coming out of the trance it induces, what came back into my mind was a line of John Keats: “half in love with easeful death”. I don’t know whether Sigmund Freud was right to claim that humanity has a death wish, but in Death Valley it certainly seems so.
Surrounded by this vision of a Mars-like Earth, you are anesthetised. All the anxieties about climate change drop away because it feels like it has now happened. The struggle is over, we lost, and the world goes on without us.
All of this is illusion, of course, the weird effect of a kind of sensory deprivation. But it stays with you, in the way (I am told) an acid trip might do. You feel you’ve seen a non-human future and it is hard to unsee it.
This week I was briefly in a very different kind of abyss: London in temperatures of almost 40 degrees. The official advice was that there was a “risk of serious injury or death” simply from being outdoors.
It was not as impressive as Death Valley, but there was something of that same paradoxical feeling of lassitude in the face of existential threats. The city seemed more dazed than alarmed.
We are, it seems, burning down the house, while singing along to a Peggy Lee record: “And I watched the whole world go up in flames./ And when it was all over I said to myself/ Is that all there is to a fire?”
It’s all around us now, even in western Europe: vast wildfires in Portugal, France, Spain and Greece; Italy’s biggest glacier melting in the heat; hundreds of people dying of heatstroke.
Last week many of us were enthralled by the fabulous images of the universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. But Nasa also releases satellite images of our own planet – “before” and “after” shots of landscapes being transformed by climate change: shrinking lakes, disappearing ice sheets, extreme floods carving new channels in the earth.
You can watch, for example, farmland disappearing in the Nile river delta, one of the places from which civilisation emerged. Rising sea levels mean that the land is being salinized. Places that were fertile for thousands of years and until a few decades ago come to look more and more like the salt flats of Death Valley.
The heatwave is crashing even over our own chilly shores. Even in Ireland this week there has been the unfamiliar feeling of danger. The idea of “bad weather” has taken a strange turn.
Sun-seeking, sun-worshipping, the hunger of damp bones for heat, the paleskins’ desire to be darkened – these impulses are imprinted on our Irish consciousness. It goes against our nature to close the curtains for coolness in the middle of the day, to seek refuge in the shade and shadows.
These unfamiliar needs arise from the changes we have already made to the atmosphere. They are the consequences of the portents we have ignored for decades.
Nature is now lighting fiery beacons of warning on every hilltop. But we are getting used to them: if that’s all there is to a fire then let’s keep dancing.
We can, after all, get used to almost anything. The capacity to adjust and adapt is what has made our species so good at inhabiting the Earth. But it is also what could make us so bad at keeping it habitable.
How dangerous does it have to get before those of us in the most privileged habitats recognise the disasters that are already unfolding for so much of humanity?
The optimist in me says that human beings are actually not very good at imagining the future – they have to see it before their eyes and feel it on their skin. And therefore that, horrible as they are, these extreme weather events are doing us the favour of making climate change vivid, immediate and undeniable.
The pessimist recalls that strangely dreamy feeling of peace in Badwater Basin. There is the nagging fear that the signs of our own impending destruction can feel like wonders, that we can consume the portents of doom as hypnotic spectacles. We can walk through the valley of death and fear no evil because we are spellbound by its strangeness.
The heat is killing. It is also stupefying. It saps the energy that is required for action.
While we were burning up all the political noise in Ireland was about how farmers cannot be asked to reduce carbon and methane emissions too quickly, and how industry needs a “breathing space” from the pressure to meet climate targets.
Meanwhile, in the Death Valley of a dangerously hot London half of the candidates to be the next British prime minister were vying with each other to liberate their country from the tyrant of “zero carbon”.
The death instinct is strong. Every interest group has its reasons for thinking that someone else should do something. How hot does it have to get before it is finally too hot to bear?