Lucifer rules: I have lived through many a Rome summer, each of them at one time or another invariably stricken by heat waves of different durations. For decades, most residents of the city did without air-conditioning, reserved in the large for luxury hotels. But this new and unremitting vapor lock, carried over weeks not days, bears no resemblance to any past in my memory. The city is oppressed by a bloated humidity as corpulent at midnight as it is at midday.
The mercury reading of the Mediterranean Sea has risen, and weather, like politics, now seems geared to extremes. The power grid in my neighborhood is made feeble and breaks down repeatedly, a new development. And yet, these unlivable temperatures appear likely to persist for years to come. It matters less to me if climate change is human-made or not. But what is evident in this latest brutal stretch is that the planet is undergoing major change of the kind that once exterminated entire species through excesses of temperature both high and low. The message to humans is clear, though it may take a century to absorb — beware, you may be the next woolly mammoth, but extinguished through sweat, not ice.