Paris is telling people to cool off in canals. Let that image sit for a moment before we discuss what produced it.
This week, France is braced for temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, potentially breaking all-time June records, with humidity making 40C feel like 47C in the capital. Temporary fountains have been deployed. Public pools are staying open late. Vulnerable people, which in French heat policy means the elderly, the poor, and people living alone in apartments without air conditioning, are on a care watch list. Comparisons are being drawn to the August 2003 heatwave in which almost 15,000 people died in France alone.
This is not a freak event. Europe has been in a heatwave cycle since late May, with temperatures running 10 to 15 degrees Celsius above normal, killing at least 11 people and breaking all-time records for highest spring temperatures across the UK, France, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Ireland. The UK recorded its hottest May day ever at 34.8 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record by 2 full degrees. Scientists have said this clearly and without hedging: climate change is contributing to the earlier onset of summer and the increased frequency and severity of these events.
The canal is not a charming Parisian quirk this summer. It is infrastructure triage.
Now look at what the country most responsible for accelerating this situation was doing last weekend. The United States, which has produced more cumulative greenhouse gas emissions than any nation in history, held a professional cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House, complete with promotional materials featuring a shirtless CGI president flexing for the cameras, while the man whose administration has spent eighteen months dismantling every institutional mechanism we had for addressing climate change nodded off cageside and woke up asking what he missed.
What he missed was the canal notice in Paris. What he missed, more precisely, is what his administration has been methodically destroying since January 2025.
The US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took effect on January 27, 2026, the second time Trump has pulled the country out of the only binding international climate framework in existence. But withdrawal from Paris was only the beginning. Trump also withdrew the United States from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational 1992 treaty that every nation on earth had signed, and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global scientific body studying the problem, making the US the first country in history to exit the UNFCCC. His administration cancelled the sixth National Climate Assessment, scrubbed climate science from government websites, and packed the EPA with former fossil fuel lobbyists. The last twelve years have been the twelve hottest years on record. His response has been to remove the country from every institution designed to track, study, and respond to that fact.
The science his administration is suppressing is not ambiguous about where this goes.
In ten years, by 2036, the world is on track to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, the threshold the Paris Agreement identified as the boundary between manageable and dangerous. To stay below 1.5 degrees, global emissions would need to fall by 55 percent by 2035. Current national commitments, if fully implemented, would cut them by only 12 to 15 percent. The gap between where we are going and where the science says we need to be is not a rounding error. It is a chasm, and the United States just threw its measuring equipment into it.
In twenty years, by 2046, under current policies without significant course correction, global temperatures are projected to reach between 2.3 and 2.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by end of century, with the trajectory already locked in for much of that warming well before 2050. At 2 degrees, the heatwaves currently making Paris canals into emergency cooling infrastructure become routine summer events in northern Europe. At 2.5 degrees, the 2003 event that killed 15,000 French people becomes a mild year. At 2.8 degrees, large portions of the Middle East and South Asia become seasonally uninhabitable by outdoor workers during daylight hours. These are not activist projections. They are the consensus output of the scientific institutions the current administration has abandoned, defunded, or withdrawn from.
Heat-related deaths already reached an average of 546,000 per year globally, and an additional 124 million people faced food insecurity due to droughts and heatwaves in 2023 alone. That is the baseline. That is what we are accelerating from.
Amnesty International and the International Court of Justice have both stated that US withdrawal from global climate frameworks sets a disturbing precedent aimed at dismantling the global system of cooperation on climate action, and that as an influential superpower, acts of coercion pressuring other countries to double down on fossil fuels cause particular harm and threaten to reverse more than a decade of global climate progress.
None of this is speculative. None of it is contested by anyone with scientific credentials who is not on a fossil fuel payroll. The physics of the greenhouse effect was established in the 19th century. The measurements have been accumulating for a hundred years. The projections have been getting more accurate, not less, because the warming is tracking the high end of the models rather than the low end. The people in Paris cooling off in canals are not experiencing a weather anomaly. They are experiencing the early installments of a bill that has been running for 150 years of industrial emissions, and the largest single debtor just walked out of the room where the restructuring was being negotiated, announced it was drilling more, and held a birthday party.
The anti-science posture of this administration is not a policy disagreement. It is not a difference of opinion about economic tradeoffs. It is a decision, made in full possession of the evidence, to accelerate a catastrophe in exchange for short-term extraction profits and the political support of industries that have known about the damage since the 1970s and spent fifty years funding the denial. Trump has dismissed climate change as a “con job” while surrounding himself with a former fracking executive running the Energy Department and an EPA staffed with former fossil fuel lobbyists.
The people of Paris are swimming in canals in June. In twenty years, if the trajectory holds, their grandchildren will be doing it in May. The science that could have changed the trajectory is being defunded by the government of the country that produced the most emissions, led by a man who fell asleep at a cage fight and woke up to post about Dumocrats at two in the morning.
The canal is the metaphor. The canal is also just a canal, and the water is warm, and it is only going to get warmer, and the people responsible for that are not in it.