“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.” These words end James Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1963 nonfiction book, The Fire Next Time, in which he warned of the consequences of racial injustice and oppression in America. The phrase comes from an old African American spiritual, ‘Mary don’t You Weep,’ which refers to God’s promise to Noah that there would be no more floods to punish humanity for its sins. The next punishment would be fire.
As I follow the news of the weather implications of climate change around the globe Baldwin’s words keep coming to mind and I can’t help but think that he was right—and wrong at the same time.
North America, Europe, and Asia have this year been subjected to punishing heat waves that U.S. climate czar John Kerry calls “a threat to all of humankind.” Long droughts in Europe have raised the risk of extensive wildfires, extreme heat has hit China hard, and from the Middle East to the American Southwest, workers have had to suffer blistering heat. Not much in the news has been said about Africa, which has suffered from climate change-induced heat waves for years. Recently, I heard the term urban heat island, the phenomenon where urban areas trap excessive and deadly heat, used in referring to European and American cities. African cities have had this problem for decades. Maybe, now that people outside Africa are being affected, the world will pay attention and do something about it.
The wildfires affecting Europe, and the Canadian wildfires that have sent smoke clouds south as far as North Carolina and beyond, have caught our attention. When I lived in Cambodia I had to breath smoke from forest fires in Indonesia which got scant attention in American media.
But it’s not just the heat that’s a problem, friends.
Climate change has also caused unusually heavy rains that have led to flooding. In the U.S. Northeast, for example, flooding has caused a number of deaths. There has also been heavy flooding in Australia and other parts of North America. In 2022, though, more than 600 people were killed in Nigeria in the worst flooding in a decade. In 2023, over 2,000 people have been killed in Africa from floods and more than 2,500 are missing and unaccounted for.
Worse, the continent of Africa has suffered from drought and flooding caused by climate change for decades and most of the rest of the world hasn’t noticed. Now that the whole globe is feeling the pain . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see. What does seem clear is that humanity’s next punishment, if we don’t take action now, will be ‘fire and water.’