LToday like “Happy” (with copyright sign) are inspired by happiness, which the Enlightenment pioneer Erasmus von Rotterdam inimitably remarked on in his satire “In Praise of Folly”. You are completely liberated from all self-doubt. “Freedom loving” as he or she is, a phrase of unimaginable medical depth graces his or her Twitter page: “If the heat is killing us all then I wonder why countries like Spain, Italy, Malta and France all have higher life expectancies than Germany (80.9 years)?” Cause and effect. So heat helps, the climate catastrophe can come. Unfortunately, logic as a strict special discipline of philosophy is not the easiest and, above all, not always the very first solution for scientific questions. Everyone knows examples of this.
The television meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann is a scientifically trained specialist for heat. On heat wave days, it regularly triggers Twitter thunderstorms that are suitable for finally letting the heat get to your head. Kachelmann would agree with “Happy” insofar as he considers the heat in the context of climate change to be fundamentally overrated. Kachelmann specified today on Deutschlandfunk, the information broadcaster that he had already classified as stupid after a heat program because it also didn’t want to understand that it wasn’t heat but drought that was the real problem with climate change. When the forest burns like it is now in Europe (but incidentally also in China, the USA, in faraway Siberia and elsewhere), it is always – “one hundred percent” – arson. He includes negligent fire devils, such as discarded cigarette butts. In any case, broken glass lying around would not ignite a forest fire, because fire only burns at two or three hundred degrees. Do you see the logic? In the Spanish Pyrenees, 42 degrees have just been measured at 1,100 meters above sea level. That’s damn hot, but it’s not enough for the meteorologist to cause the fire.
Even if the whole planet were smoldering at 45 degrees, Kachelmann wouldn’t think to concede what is scientifically well documented: that more heat via evaporation fuels drought and thus fuels climate change-induced forest flaring. Kachelmann moves with his heat trivialization Today he lives in Switzerland, he originally comes from Lörrach, and the fact that he has lived in a wooded area all his life is enough for people like “Happy” to take him seriously as a forest fire expert. It would be unfair to describe them all as crooks, as Kachelmann calls those who contradict his own teaching without exception. Lateral thinker doesn’t work either, the name is reserved for corona deniers and opponents of vaccination. “Querschwitzer” is apt, but admittedly it’s ugly and a term of abuse from the current heat crisis that hasn’t gotten very far yet. But what does that mean. As the Twitter philosopher “Happy” put it so beautifully: “True words are not pretty & pretty words aren’t true”. There was always something missing, wasn’t it always?