Reality has surpassed fantasy: today's temperatures 11 years ago were science fiction

Believe it or not, we have already reached that point in history where reality surpasses fantasy. In these muggy days, in an attempt to respond to the usual climate crisis deniers, to those who say "it has always been hot", more videos taken from the Rai Archives than old weather forecasts from the past have bounced around Italian social media. In the summers of years ago, the great Italian meteorologists, from Edmondo Bernacca to Andrea Baroni to Guido Caroselli, spoke of sunny days with the classic Mediterranean climate: in June or July temperatures around 28 degrees, thirty at most, and not the almost forty that we have all experienced in the last week just at the beginning of the season. If in Italy we try to respond like this, reminding ourselves on social media of what the weather was like to try to describe the current emergency underway, in France an episode occurred where reality has truly surpassed fantasy. A sort of lesson for everyone.

“Temperatures for August 18, 2050”

In 2014, the famous meteorologist and weather presenter on TF1, Evelyne Dhéliat , decided to make a fake weather forecast in a show that went down in history to try to explain how the climate crisis would impact the country in the future. A sort of exaggeration, frightening at the time, to show the advance of global warming. She then decided to hypothesize what August 18 would be like in France in 2050 , showing a very red map of the transalpine territory: in Paris, Dhéliat predicted, there would be as much as 40 degrees, in the north of the country peaks of 38 degrees and in the south it would reach 43.

After reading the numbers, the presenter had to remind the viewers, frightened by the boiling weather, that it was just her imagination.

Now that weather is the news

This fake weather report aired just 11 years ago and attempted to predict what would happen 36 years later: but the reality tells us otherwise, that is, that it was even almost 25 years early.

In France, in fact, in recent days, temperatures have reached peaks of at least 41.6 degrees, and from boiling Paris, which has touched forty degrees, to the center and south of the country, the mercury column has shown temperatures not only very similar to those that Dhéliat hypothesized for 2050, but sometimes even higher.

On the Atlantic coast, for example, the presenter invented high temperatures for the period, which could oscillate between 26 and 30 degrees, which in reality this week went well beyond, around 35. "It was a fiction for 2050 and we have already largely exceeded it" said the same meteorologist returning to TV precisely to talk about the experience of that experiment.

Of course, weather is not synonymous with climate, and currently we must take into account the impacts of heat waves and, indeed, the advance of the climate crisis, but it is still impressive to see how a broadcast from over 10 years ago - assuming the increase in temperatures in Europe in the following 36 years - today seems even "cautious" compared to the current reality. A bit like when, for the city of Nantes, Dhéliat exaggerated: he spoke of 30 degrees, but in recent days it has reached 36.