Hot, Hotter, Hottest
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In tropical Singapore we used to joke that we had four seasons, just like any temperate country, except that our seasons were hot, hotter, hottest, and shopping, which was all-year round. Underneath the joke is a tragic truth: the rapid economic development of Singapore, together with its urban transformation of the island, has desensitized us to the trade winds and the monsoons of the region. More, it has desensitized us to the dismantling of our basic human rights, free speech, free assembly, free and fair elections. Climate change in Singapore—not just rises in temperature but also more frequent flooding—has also been social and political. Jolene Tan, whose compelling essay "Out of the Well," kicks off our month-long series of writings on the theme of climate change, puts it this way: "... on this island, we enact routines especially distant from any self-sustaining equilibrium,...