This might be the coldest summer I have left, and it isn’t going to feel like it.
Forecasters are talking about a very strong El Niño peaking somewhere between October and January, with some models pushing sea surface temperatures past anything recorded since 1950. For South Africa that usually means hot and dry across the interior, dams drawn down, the maize belt praying for rain that doesn’t arrive on schedule. Whatever this summer turns out to be, cold isn’t on the list.
Flip the line around and it makes more sense: every summer from here trends hotter than this one, whether or not this one feels mild. Today is supposedly the coldest day of the rest of your life, and there’s no obvious reason a hot summer breaks that pattern rather than confirming it. It’s a slogan more than a law, though. ENSO has quiet years too, and a La Niña could knock the average back down in two or three seasons, at which point someone will use the dip to argue the whole thing was overstated. What’s rising is the average, not every point sitting on top of it.
Dam levels on the evening news do more to me than any global average. So does remembering Cape Town’s countdown to Day Zero, twenty-five litres a day per person, which was the trailer, not the film. Eskom’s coal stations need water to cool themselves, too, so a bad drought doesn’t only wreck a harvest; it can lean on the grid at the same time, water and power and food all running through the same overstretched system, built long before anyone was planning for this.
None of it lands evenly. A borehole and a generator turn a bad summer into an inconvenience. A single communal tap, or a day-rate wage that depends on a harvest coming in, turns the same weather report into a catastrophe. “Climate change” as a phrase carries a lot of “we’re all in this together” that the actual exposure doesn’t back up.
I’ve caught myself checking the seasonal rainfall outlook the way I used to check the load shedding schedule: first thing, before coffee, out of habit rather than need. Not one bad summer, then. Getting used to checking.
I’ll be watching the Vaal system’s dam levels come November, like a lot of people here will. Hoping the number holds. Knowing hoping has never once been the thing that made it hold.