'Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken," says the climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota. "After all the flooding, fires and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people's best interest."
Instead, Cerezo-Mota expects the world to heat by a catastrophic 3C this century, soaring past the internationally agreed 1.5C target and delivering enormous suffering to billions of people. This is her optimistic view, she says.
"The breaking point for me was a meeting in Singapore," says Cerezo-Mota, an expert in climate modelling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. There, she listened to other experts spell out the connection between rising global temperatures and heatwaves, fires, storms and floods hurting people - not at the end of the century, but today. "That was when everything clicked," she says.
"I got a depression. It was a very dark point in my life. I was unable to do anything and was just sort of surviving."
Cerezo-Mota recovered to continue her work: "We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn't know. We know what we're talking about. They can say they don't care, but they can't say they didn't know."
In Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula, where Cerezo-Mota lives, the heat is ramping up. "Last summer, we had around 47C maximum. Even at night, it's 38C, which is higher than your body temperature. It doesn't give a minute of the day for your body to try to recover."
She says record-breaking heatwaves led to many deaths in Mexico.
Esta historia es de la edición May 17, 2024 de The Guardian Weekly.
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