Fire-breathing storms are no longer the stuff of myth. As climate change reshapes the world, science can explain the threat — but only politics can turn that knowledge into practical solutions.
It turns out dragons do exist, without the fairy tales. They breathe fire, fueling enormous volcanic-like eruptions that can reach the boundary separating the troposphere from the stratosphere. High above, at what is known as the tropopause, a combination of hot air, smoke, moisture and wind gusts creates unpredictable weather phenomena involving lightning, thunder and storms. These are now being studied by a new branch of science: pyrometeorology.
Science will continue to observe, investigate, publish findings and warn of dangers — and, sometimes, draw inspiration from the world of fairy tales so that the rest of us can use our childhood imagination to grasp what we lack the scientific knowledge to comprehend. “Pyrocumulonimbus clouds are like dragons breathing fire.”
The good news is that the human species has evolved far enough to explain the world instead of interpreting it through dark demons, angry gods and terrifying prophecies. Fortunately, we no longer devote ourselves to ritual sacrifices intended to appease nature. We no longer stir potions in cauldrons or burn witches at the stake, their cursed hands bound tightly to the post.
Now we know not only that the destruction is human-made. We also know that if salvation is to come, it will have to come from us.
Fine. But how do we stop the sky — and its dragons — from falling on our heads? What can we do to keep the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from ever knocking on our door, or to prove Nostradamus wrong?
Probably politics.
Not the archaic kind of politics, with ideological fixations that resemble superstition, anti-scientific populism and a tendency to collide with reality in the name of some doctrine. But politics connected to science, capable of devising practical solutions because its job is to care for the community.
That is neither as unlikely as it sounds nor as disconnected from everyday life.
We Greeks build concrete skyscrapers and create new residential “heat islands” over the sea. Singaporeans, once known as the “air-conditioning nation,” are developing high-tech cooling solutions. Having already constructed skyscrapers and Supertrees with vertical gardens that are considered models of biomimetic architecture, they are now funding an institute where architects, urban planners, and climate and energy specialists work together.
In both cases, all it took was a political decision.
Ours is no longer “tried and tested”; it is stuck in the past. Theirs confronts the future — yes, the future with fire-breathing dragons that do not come from fairy tales.
The problem, in other words, is a shared one: life in the human-made age of heat waves and dragons.
And it is not confined to Greece and Singapore. The French are shading parking lots with solar canopies, the Belgians are devising their own green cities, and the Spanish are transforming their energy system.
But here is our particular political problem.
The Greek right still measures growth in bricks laid on construction sites and occupancy rates on the islands. Antiparochi — Greece’s postwar system of exchanging land for apartments — and rooms to let, just as in the last century.
The left, meanwhile, demonizes wind turbines today just as it once protested against pedestrianization projects and the widening of Syngrou Avenue in Athens.
Which of the two will write the “dragon manifesto”?
Probably neither.
We burn long before others do, and we suffered through heat waves while others were still enjoying cool, even cold summers.
And yet, immersed in our fairy tales without dragons, we have stopped coming up with solutions.
