We already had the absurd heat and mitigation engineering in Qatar, now the Washington Post brings us to the once bitterly cold Siberia. Thawing yedoma permafrost perforates the land with puddles and causes floods. Climate refugees abound and mammoths make a fishy comeback. Great reporting on yet another extreme warning case for climate change.

Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks. His grandfather, a peasant, was declared an enemy of the working class and sent to one of this region’s many gulag prison camps. “As soon as you start getting used to something, they’ll come up with something else, and you have to adapt to everything all over again,”

This brought me back to a scene from Chernobyl (2019). Young soldiers try to evict a stubborn old lady from her house in the radiation zone. She doesn't budge. She overcame wars, revolutions and her children got killed. If the regions most affected by climate change today are already the poorest and least fortunate in history, how can people there bring up the energy for proactively fighting climate change? Or trusting in global cooperation? They live, understandably, in a mode of survival.