Have You Clocked The White Hot Silvery Sunshine?

---

---

The childhood memory I hold of the summer sunshine is a warm yellow ball in the sky. I used to draw it just like that with crayons at primary school. Perhaps you did too?

Back then (in the 1970s and 80s), the seasons seemed distinct and, if memory serves me correctly, we would generally have a couple of hotter weeks which would define our summer.

However, when I look up to the sky these days, the sunshine doesn’t align with those childhood memories at all. It’s white hot and regularly unbearable. 

There’s a reason for it.

Geo-engineering by mistake

I can remember the first time I became aware that we humans could affect something so huge as Planet Earth’s climate; again it was in childhood, perhaps 9 or 10 years old, admiring the rich colours of the sun setting over the sea with my dad.

It looked stunning but a casual comment he made recently popped back into my head:

“It’s just a shame the colours are so strong because of the air pollution.”

It got my young cogs turning at the time but I didn’t really think about it again until just a few years ago when I became very switched on to our ecological predicament; more specifically, when I learned about the cooling effects of certain pollutants, a phenomenon known as global dimming.

In short, there are some dirty particles we’ve been pumping into the air which fall under the banner of aerosols. You might connect that term to the CFCs of the past but these aerosols are a little different.

They are tiny reflective particles that have been floating in the atmosphere bouncing some of the sun’s heat back into space and, in turn, keeping the planet that little bit cooler than it would be otherwise.

Furthermore, because the biosphere is a very dynamic system of ultimately infinite and unknowable outcomes, a relatively simple phenomenon like air pollution doesn’t just interfere with the temperature; it interferes with other processes like the water cycle too.

Commercial ships have been chugging aerosols into the atmosphere for decades but, at the turn of the century, we reached a Faustian Bargain for this particular layer of the global crisis: do we keep polluting the air with this awful stuff (killing millions of people and other animals every year) or do we remove it, only to find out how much we’ve actually been heating the planet?

The regulatory authorities plumped for the latter and the shipping regulations were changed in 2020. We’ve been experiencing the effects of the cleaner air almost immediately, becoming rapidly magnified as more heat now flows into Earth’s atmosphere to be absorbed by the land and the ocean, supercharging vast dynamic systems such as the weather.

Global dimming has been masking the true effect of human-made global warming; we’ve been geo-engineering the climate by mistake and it’s just one of the reasons the planet is now getting very hot very quickly.

It’s called an Aerosol Termination Shock.

Leon’s Sun

We’ve been sweltering in a sequence of heatwaves here in the UK lately.

We usually escape the worst of it in Newcastle upon Tyne — a city in the far northeast of England on the same latitude as Moscow and The Aleutian Islands — but it’s still notably roasting hot and I often wonder how my friends in the south are coping where it’s sometimes unbearable, particularly if surrounded by vast swathes of concrete and tarmac.

It turns out that our roads, car parks and buildings make fantastic storage heaters and when the nighttime temperatures fail to dip substantially, there’s simply no time for them to cool down before the next bout of radiation arrives unabated at sunrise.

There’s no let-up as time passes, so the overall lived experience of unrelenting heat can build to suffocating levels in a corner of the world where we’re simply not used to it and unable to properly cater for it.

In day-to-day conversations, I’ve come to realise there’s a fundamental thing that people often haven’t grasped when looking at weather forecasts: the temperatures given are measured in the shade, not in direct sunlight.

Back in the day, 25°C would have been pretty pleasant: shorts and t-shirt weather; warm in the shade and still pretty comfortable for most in the sunshine.

But have you clocked that the difference between the shade and the sunshine feels much more brutal these days, and not just in the summer but all year round?

Yes, the shade temperatures feel pretty much like they ever did but step out into the sunshine and the radiation is coming at us, knives out.

Even on a simple practical level, just think how quickly our skin can burn these days compared to several decades ago. If that’s how it feels to us meagre metabolising blobs, imagine the scale of the forces at play.

It’s so stark that a friend and I have even named it; we call it Leon’s Sun in honour of Leon Simons who has specifically warned about this phenomenon for years.

Traditional shade temperatures are no longer useful on their own at times like these but, from the establishment’s perspective, a combo of shade and direct sunlight temperatures would perhaps only serve to spook the public further that the life we once knew has gone.

Dialled up to 11

The quality of light is different to me on these clear sky days too. It seems hyper-real, dream-like, as if we’re in some kind of CGI game or movie set.

Gulls swoop and swirl, bright glistening needles sewing a giant fabric of blue. Buildings stand taller to attention, their regimented outlines crisper than crisp.

Everything is dialled up to 11.

Of course, when I mention this in conversations, I’m often met with blank looks and feel quite alone at times, isolated in my (apparently) overthinking thoughts. Many clearly don’t notice the things I do but it also feels like there isn’t really the inclination to truly pause and look around at what’s happening.

That’s understandable. I’ve delved into the ecological abyss and it’s a dark place.

As a people we’re tired; attention is at a premium and attention span is terminally eroded. Rather than pay all this stuff too much thought, it’s soon time to reach for the chirruping notice-me-phone once again.

We may be distracted for now but nothing to see here doesn’t mean there is nothing to see. 

Shifting baseline syndrome is one of our biggest enemies too: people (sometimes wilfully) misremember how things once were and use those misperceptions as a foundation to mollify — or outright deny — the severity of the current predicament. Along with our growing culture of misinformation, it makes for a lethal cocktail.

All-in-all, the white hot silvery sunshine is a stark reminder that global warming is firmly with us and no amount of “Act now!” can turn it off like a tap. As philosopher Timothy Morton might say, we are Jonah consumed by the whale but there’s no escaping the mesh of such an all-encompassing hyperobject.

When pausing to pay attention, it soon becomes easier to understand why the planet is heating much more quickly than even the doomiest scientists would be prepared to admit over a late night scotch in a dark basement bar.

I write these things in an effort to help people understand the situation we’re actually in rather than the ridiculous mirage that’s painted slapdash before our eyes.

I’m not here to offer solutions because there aren’t any solutions; anybody who proffers them is either naive, disingenuous or both. That said, it’s not too late for some things in order to help soften the blow.

I recently read that contemplation is the most powerful form of activism. In the heat of the day, it is indeed time to truly pause and contemplate — and for much longer than a fleeting moment among the distractions of modern life, if only to prioritise more time with our loved ones and the things we like doing most of all.