Summer is coming: what Game of Thrones can teach us about the upcoming heat crisis

There is a particular kind of political failure that recurs across history, and that storytellers, from Tolstoy to George R.R. Martin, seem to understand better than the institutions themselves. Game of Thrones is perhaps the most vivid recent example. In it, the existential threat is not the political intrigue consuming the Seven Kingdoms, it is the army of the dead advancing from the north, ignored by rulers too absorbed in their own rivalries to coordinate against it. The warning has been issued. The threat is real. The window to prepare is closing. And yet the institutions that should be responding are locked in their separate agendas, each defending their own domain, none of them owning the problem that falls between. That problem, in our case, is not white walkers. It is the humble air conditioners and cold chains keeping our food and medicines from getting spoiled, and their effects the climate.The threats of unregulated refrigeration on global warming is not unacknowledged.…