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In 2009, as a distraction from everyday editorial work, I collected #Sommerlochtiere for the first time on Twitter.
Many media people helped, and so every year a nice collection came together: "Moose storms in the supermarket for a cold beer", "Squirrel gets drunk in the pub and riot", "Goat causes 'animal' traffic jam".
From today's perspective, they were peaceful, downright innocent times.
Even then, the idea of the summer slump had long been absurd, after all, it was the year of the financial crisis.
The term “summer slump” only exists in Germany, but the »Sauregurkenzeit«, which has the same meaning, is still an international concept: It exists in Hungary and Estonia, Croatia and Iceland, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.
In Great Britain the term “cucumber season” appeared as early as the 19th century, today this time is mostly called “silly season” there.
In Sweden it is called "news drought" or "lazy month", in France "dead season".
There are no more local weather disasters
All the cucumber times and their relatives have something in common: They date from a time when news and politics were primarily national affairs.
The summer slump arises from the parliamentary summer vacation, summer breaks in sports, the vacation time.
In election years it was always smaller or completely, but the basic idea that there are a few months in summer when little is going on is still alive today.
Of course, world events don't take a break in summer.
In 2021 it will be more visible than ever before what will replace the summer slump in the future: Summer in the northern hemisphere is now always also disaster season.
Climate news is always news of global relevance, just like its consequences for the incredibly complex system of global supply chains.
The »Ever Given« mishap in the Suez Canal made it clear as a snapshot of the consequences of getting stuck somewhere in the complex machinery of the globalized economy.
Climate change and the global economy are global phenomena, both man-made.
And it doesn't matter to either of them whether it's July or August.
In a wheelchair from the tennis court
Not only the devastating flood disasters in parts of Germany are part of the overall picture, but also international news such as the fact that tennis players are interrupting their games at the Olympic Games in Tokyo because they are afraid of death in heat.
A Spanish player had to be driven off the pitch in a wheelchair after suffering from heat stroke.
Such situations are now everywhere and more and more common.
A friend who lives in the USA wrote to me this week that he had almost got used to the constant heat and the constant smell of burning in the air.
The catastrophe becomes permanent.
And the "fire season" in the USA is far from over.
The term "flood of the century" has long since become meaningless
There were floods not only in our country, but also in the Chinese province of Henan.
Millions of people are affected by the gigantic flood disaster there, including the metropolis of Zhengzhou.
There, as much rain fell in six hours as usual in a year, in some regions more than the annual amount fell.
The area is an industrial region, and it cannot be ruled out that this catastrophe, once again dubbed the "flood of the century", will affect global supply chains.
This is not the only reason why all the international disaster reports are also relevant in Germany, which is itself a disaster-ridden country.
"Weather, climate and water-related hazards are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change," said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently.
The record heat waves in North America, for example, are "clearly linked to global warming."
The Amazon forest is tilting
In addition to climate-related disasters, there are other extremely worrying processes that interact with them.
The eastern Amazon rainforest, for example, now emits more CO2 than it absorbs, through "the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation," as a study recently published in "Nature" puts it.
On the occasion of “Earth Overload Day”, which fell on July 28th in 2021, an article published in the science magazine “Bioscience” this week warned 14,000 scientists of catastrophic consequences.
"There is growing evidence that we are approaching turning points from various systems on Earth, or have even passed them," said one of the authors.
What if everyone lived like us?
Humanity will consume so many resources and cause damage in 2021 that we would need 1.7 Earths to make up for all of this.
We have been crossing the so-called planetary limits every year since the 1970s.
It is true that the day on which we have used up everything that the earth can regenerate no longer moves forward as quickly in the calendar as it did a few years ago.
And the corona pandemic has even given the destruction time series of the Global Footprint Network a small dent to the top.
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Christian Stocker
We are the experiment: our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.
We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
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But that doesn't change the fact that humanity continues to deplete the planet every year.
At the same time, our emissions are throwing the earth system out of balance, which has given us a fairly stable climate for around 10,000 years.
The calculations of the Global Footprint Network also punish all those lies that insist that Germany only has a small share in the violence that we do to our planet and ultimately to ourselves: If the entire world population lived like us Germans, "Earth Overshoot Day" would have already been reached on May 5th this year.
Lived the whole world like Canada, Kuwait or the USA on March 14th.
The earth overload day of China, rightly scolded for its huge CO2 emissions, is currently even further down on this ranking of planetary exploiters, which takes into account various factors: on June 7th.
Face the planetary realities
This new world situation should actually mean the end of the summer slump, about which one could still joke happily in this country a few years ago: there are no longer times with little news.
The most important news is always global news.
And this news is very often very bad right now.
The creeping catastrophe that mankind has known about for decades can no longer be ignored.
And yet all of this is still just the beginning.
Mankind will have to experience many more seasons of disaster.
Three months from now, at the world climate summit in Glasgow, it will show whether the growing visibility of the species and climate crisis around the world will also increase the willingness to take decisive political and economic action.
And the industrial and technological nation of Germany, which was significantly involved in the destruction, is to be hoped for a future federal government that finally really faces up to the planetary realities.