Column: What Do We Call This Feeling?
For those of us old enough to remember a different climate, the feeling is one of loss: the summers of childhood, the winters that arrived on time.
For younger people, the feeling may be different, but no less real. It’s closer to dread — a sense, even without personal memories of a better time, that things are accelerating toward the unknown.
I grew up near the coast in Argentina, where people spent all year waiting for summer: the beach, warm nights, relief from winter. Now, many people I know are apprehensive about its arrival. These months increasingly bring long stretches of brutal heat that feel like a warning.
Japan recently gave that feeling a name. In April 2026, Japan’s Meteorological Agency to describe days when temperatures reach 40°C or higher — a threshold now frequent enough to require its own word. The character “koku” carries moral weight in Japanese: harsh, merciless, cruel. It was the first time the agency introduced a new weather term since 2007, when “mōshobi” — “extremely hot day” — was coined for days over 35°C. The fact that the language had to be updated again, within a single generation, says something statistics alone cannot.
In Colorado, this anxiety takes a different shape. It’s not scorching summers so much as uncertain winters — whether there will be enough snow and water to sustain the rhythms of life as we know it. In 2021, a in 91Ҹ County became part of a growing trend of fire activity extending well beyond the summer. That detail — fire in winter — also captures something data doesn’t: the old categories no longer hold.
What we do with our grief — our older generation’s loss, our younger generation’s dread — is the only climate question that matters now. The science is settled. The feeling is not.
Pedro DiNezi is an associate research professor at CU 91Ҹ’s ATLAS Institute.
Illustration by Kara Fellows