A Fever in a Historic Heatwave

Are we burning enough yet?

My cats, Tortilla on the left and Chickpea on the right, cooling down in the 32-degree heat today in Barcelona.

Last night I wrote a short note apologising for being more absent these days. I said I had been battling the flu in the middle of a historic heatwave here in Europe, here in Barcelona, where I live, and that the combination had made me virtually useless at writing anything solid.

That part was true. Here I am the next day, still sick, still sweating, perhaps even more so today, but now I have had more time to think about why this week has bugged me so much.

First, I want to thank everyone for the lovely messages. They meant a lot. It is still absurd to me that one day I decided to start a Substack and now, months later, I have connected with thousands of people in all corners of the world. People who are curious, empathetic, worried about democracy, and concerned about this world we all share. In one way or another, these are the people I have always gravitated towards.

I have been sick in my third-floor flat while Barcelona feels as if someone has put a lid over the city. The blackout curtains are up. Blankets cover parts of my flat to keep the worst of the sun out. The air conditioner has to run all day. I am worried about the electricity bill, obviously, but I do not see another choice. The fan runs on the other side of the apartment. The cats sleep in the coldest places they can find. I move around looking for cooler corners like a deeply unglamorous lizard. I point the fan at myself, then it irritates my throat. My room is pitch-black, and now I am also worried about whether my plants are getting enough sun.

First world problems, huh?

This is the level of climate anxiety I am currently operating at. The planet is heating, my throat aches, and I am worried about my electricity bill, my cats, my plants, and whether my brain will produce a sentence that makes sense.

It is too hot in this city to go outside before evening. This is no longer just Barcelona in summer. I have lived here for a few years now, long enough to be semi-local about heat, which mostly means knowing when to surrender. You quickly understand why the city runs late. Siesta at 3 p.m., dinner at 11 p.m., the slow rearranging of the day around the sun. You do not do much in the middle of the afternoon if you can avoid it. The people outside are often tourists, and I always hope they all have water, sun cream, and a better plan than walking through stone streets under a burning sky.

There is nothing noble about being sick in this sweltering heat. I kept trying to write this week, but most of what came out was nonsense. I am self-critical at the best of times, but this was different. The flu was definitely part of it. Still, it was the heat that made my brain feel worthless. It made my mind inept at writing, at doing my job, at doing one of the things I love most.

That alarmed me more than I anticipated.

I had thought about climate change as something governments argue about. Of course, I had. I had heard people talk about it on the news, in speeches, in reports, in all those distant ways that never quite feel like they belong to your own life.

I had not really thought about what it would do to my writing.

That sounds small, maybe even selfish, but it did something to me. This week made me realise how quickly this is arriving, how it is already shaping more parts of my life than I had fully admitted. The heating of the world settles into the body and the room, shaping how you sleep, how you breathe, how you move through your own space. It is already interfering with the things you love doing, and it will affect even more of them as it continues to accelerate.

Climate change affects us directly. If it is not today, it will be tomorrow, or soon enough. This week, for me, the historic highs of the heatwave made writing basically impossible. It felt like it was taking away the things I love most.

I am still very early in this writing life. I only really started sharing my work properly in December 2025, and somehow, there are now thousands of people from all over the world reading it. That still touches me in ways I do not fully know how to describe. I have always been a private person, so having an audience often feels strange. Lovely, but strange. It comes with weight. Any audience comes with responsibility.

This week, because I could not write properly, I realised how much I love it. I kept opening my laptop, staring at the screen, typing a few lines and deleting them again. It felt wrong, like trying to speak with the wrong voice. I missed the rhythm of it, the feeling when a sentence finally lands the way it should. I missed the quiet connection of knowing that something I write here in Barcelona might reach someone sitting somewhere completely different, maybe in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, reading it on their Sunday afternoon on the porch.

Then another thought occurred to me.

Is this heat going to make my writing worse, and more broadly, how will we be able to live like this?

I do not mean that as an excuse. If I am a weak writer, I can learn. I hope I will get better over the years. I already think I have come a long way. But these last days made me realise that climate change will affect even the things we think are ours: attention, patience, sleep, work, thought, and the daily practices that allow a person to become who they are trying to become.

For most of my life, climate change still had a future tense. I knew about it as a child. We all did. We heard about 2050, 2075, two degrees, rising seas, emissions, targets, charts. It sounded terrifying, but it also sounded scheduled, like something waiting further down the road.

Now it is 2026, and the heat has long arrived.

Global warming and, more broadly, climate change are already upon us.

Across Europe, the news settles into a single, suffocating tone. Heat presses down on France until it turns lethal; Britain’s June slips past its own records as if they were nothing; classrooms empty, hospitals strain, and warnings ripple outward only to dissolve into the next day’s dread. The words grow sharper, more urgent; though they seem to land with less force each time, as if we are slowly learning how to hear catastrophe without feeling it.

By 2026, we have become very good at hearing catastrophic things in a normal voice.

That might be what angers me most: the calm, measured tone in which all of this is discussed, as if it were still abstract, still debatable, while people are already dying from heat across the world every year.

I also think about Donald Trump being president of the United States again, the most powerful democracy in the world, while openly casting doubt on climate science itself. He has called global warming a hoax, dismissed scientific consensus, and rolled back policies meant to address it. There are still millions of people who deny the basic reality of what is happening around them.

What the fuck?

That is not elegant, but I do not know what else to say. Go outside and feel the air for yourself. Notice how the summers have shifted, how the heat lingers and presses in ways it did not before. It is there in the strain on hospitals, in the faint vulnerability of those who cannot escape it, in the way daily life flexes around something that used to be the backdrop.

This is already here.

And yes, we need air conditioning. I need it. My cats need cooling. Sick people need it. Hospitals need it. Children need it. There is no virtue in pretending that heat builds character when it has become dangerous.

Still, I cannot shake the feeling that air conditioning is becoming the defining object of our time. The white box on the wall, humming away while the world outside becomes less livable. It gives relief, then quietly reminds you that relief is all we seem to be asking for.

That is the fear I keep saying out loud, only to the people closest to me. Will Barcelona become unlivable for us? Will Spain become increasingly difficult to inhabit? Will we one day have to move north, only to find that north is heating too? I love this city. It has become a home for me. I do not want to start thinking of home as a place with an expiry date.

Maybe this essay is a bit of a ramble. It probably is. But it is also the first thing I have been able to write in days, and after all the struggling, I think it came out okay. More than that, it reminded me how much I love writing. I missed it. I missed being here. I missed connecting with you.

So I am writing this from my sofa, fan pointed at my face, eyes drying from the wind, throat irritated, AC humming, cats lying around the flat in search of cooler ground. Outside, Barcelona is still too hot. Across Europe, the alerts continue. Somewhere, another official says the situation is being monitored.

Are we burning alive yet?

I think the answer is pretty clear.