France Is Hotter Than the Sahara. This Is Everyone’s Warning.

France is currently glowing red with heat. Not metaphorically. Literally. Land surface temperatures in parts of the country have been recorded at levels more commonly associated with the Sahara Desert.

France. The country of vineyards, alpine villages, stone farmhouses, rivers, forests and temperate European summers. Looking like the Sahara. That should stop us in our tracks.

The real story isn’t that France is having a heatwave. It’s that climate change is making places behave like somewhere else. Places are beginning to lose the climate that shaped their buildings, their farms, their infrastructure, their ecosystems, their communities, cultures and expectations of normal life.

France isn’t built for the Sahara. Its schools, homes, hospitals, railways, power stations and aged-care facilities weren’t designed for repeated extreme heat. Its rivers weren’t meant to run so hot that nuclear power stations have to reduce output because cooling water is too warm. Its classrooms weren’t meant to become dangerous places for children to sit exams. And this is the lesson for Australia. We can’t just watch Europe’s heatwaves as distant spectators. We can’t comfort ourselves by saying, “Well, Australia’s already hot.” That misses the point.

Climate change isn’t just making hot places hotter. It’s moving whole climate zones. It’s pushing ecosystems, infrastructure and communities beyond the conditions they evolved - or were built - to survive.

We see it when heatwaves kill flying foxes by the thousands. We see it when our ski fields struggle for snow. We see it when kelp forests collapse, coral bleaches, insects disappear, birds shift their ranges, rivers dry up, bushfire seasons lengthen and old trees die in landscapes they once dominated. We see it when places like Western Sydney, designed around cars, concrete and bitumen, become heat traps. We see it when renters and low-income households can’t afford to cool their homes. We see it when outdoor workers, elderly people, people with disabilities, children and homeless people are told to “take care” in conditions that are no longer safe.

And here’s the added danger: we keep making it normal through a sociological phenomenon called shifting baselines. Each generation accepts the environment of its own childhood as normal, even if that environment is already degraded. The birds we grew up with become our baseline. The insects on the windscreen. The frogs after rain. The cool nights. The reliable seasons. The local creek that flowed. The snow that fell. The summer days that were hot, but not lethal. Then the next generation grows up with less and calls that normal too.

This is one of the most frightening things about climate change. Not only that the planet is changing, but that our expectations are changing with it. A heatwave that would once have shocked us becomes “summer”. A bleaching event becomes “another bleaching event”. A megafire becomes “the new fire season”. A mass fish kill becomes “sad but unsurprising”. A city hotter than parts of the Sahara becomes a headline for a day, then disappears under sport, politics and celebrity gossip. That’s how collapse becomes background noise.

France looking like the Sahara isn’t just a European story. It’s a warning about how quickly the familiar can become unfamiliar. How quickly the climate we thought we knew can slip away. How quickly the places we love can become harder to recognise.

And still, our governments are approving new coal and gas projects. Still, fossil fuel companies are treated as normal businesses rather than drivers of planetary risk. Still, climate policy is discussed as if we have decades to spare. Still, people who demand urgency are called alarmist, even as the alarms keep ringing.

France is hotter than the Sahara. What more polite wording do we need? The truth is that climate change is no longer a future threat. It’s a present-tense force reshaping the world. It’s in our classrooms, power grids, hospitals, farms, forests, oceans and homes. It’s in the silence where birds used to be. It’s in the heat stored in concrete at midnight. It’s in the river water too warm to cool a power station. It’s in the child trying to concentrate in a classroom never designed for 40 degrees.

The real danger isn’t only that these events are happening. It’s that we’re learning to live with them. Not by adapting in the serious, science-based, justice-based sense. But by emotionally accommodating them. Politically absorbing them. Lowering our expectations. Shrinking our imaginations. Forgetting what abundance felt like. Forgetting what safety felt like. Forgetting that this was preventable.

We need to remember what normal was, not because the past was perfect, but because memory is resistance. Remembering cooler nights, fuller rivers, louder birdsong and safer summers helps us understand what’s already been taken and what can still be protected.

France shouldn’t look like the Sahara.

Australia shouldn’t accept a future of dead rivers, silent forests, unliveable suburbs and summers that frighten us.

Climate change is redefining the world. We mustn’t let it redefine what we accept as normal.

Map of France’s heatwave from Peter Dyne’s substack.