Kia Karjalainen and her sister were vacationing in Greece when things took an unexpected turn. “We were in our hotel room, and I suddenly said to my sister, ‘It really, really smells of smoke. Is something burning?’”
It was mid-July on the island of Rhodes, and wildfire smoke was heading in their direction. Planes flew over their hotel pool, carrying water to the fires. Everything, including their clothes, was covered in a fine layer of ash. Ms. Karjalainen, a London-based events coordinator, tried to move up their flights home, but everything was booked.
“You don’t want to put yourself in danger or other people, ” said Ms. Karjalainen, 24. “You have to think of the locals and how it vastly impacts them.” The entire experience, she said, was “eye-opening.”
Ms. Karjalainen was hardly the only traveler to have her eyes opened during the summer of 2023, when the effects of climate change — heat waves, floods, wildfires, extreme storms — seemed to crop up in every corner of the world.
July turned out to be the planet’s hottest month on record, while the period from June to August was the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest-ever summer.
As temperatures soared, parts of Western Europe slogged through long-running drought conditions, while places from Vermont to Brazil to the Himalayas were inundated with floods or landslides. And then there were the wildfires in Maui, Texas and Canada, as well as in France, Portugal, the Canary Islands — and Greece.
It was a summer of extremes, and a summer of lessons for the travelers and locals who encountered them. Looking ahead, here are some lessons from the climate change upheavals of the past few months. One thing is clear: Unpredictability is the new normal.
1. Look for new ways to keep cool in cities
The world’s cities were on the front lines this summer, and many are trying to get out in front of the weather. In Athens, where temperatures spiked to 104 degrees in July, authorities closed the Acropolis in the middle of the day; they also installed shades to offer protection from the sun. In August, authorities at the Colosseum in Rome began offering early-morning tickets, allowing visitors accompanied by an official tour guide to enter as early as 7:30 a.m. And in Paris, Berlin and Washington, D.C., some pools and parks were kept open until as late as midnight during heat waves.
The organizers of next summer’s Olympic Games in Paris are planning ahead to beat the heat. The nearly 40-year-old…
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