The Winter I Couldn’t Ignore

In the height of the global discourse surrounding climate change, the author remembers the year she first felt the extreme turn of seasons.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about middle school. Specifically, eighth grade—when the winter hit so hard that people rushed to buy sweaters and jackets in a city that had never needed them before. 

I grew up in the same town, in the same neighbourhood, and went to the same school until I graduated. It was a medium-sized city in Western India, where summers stretched on for ten months and “winter” was just a few weeks of good weather, and maybe a foggy morning or two. Nobody owned sweaters, at least not good ones, and certainly never wore them during the day. 

But in eighth grade, things changed. The winters turned cold. (Okay, 20℃, but still cold for us.) Kids started showing up in their own sweaters and jackets, since school uniforms didn’t include them. They’d never needed to. Suddenly every school scrambled to design an official winter jacket, while students enjoyed the rare freedom of bringing their own. 

I wore a grey hoodie. Slipping my hands into the front pocket felt like a huge act of rebellion, a badge of individuality that middle school never allowed us. 

Of course, I didn’t understand what that “super-cold” winter meant at the time. But the extreme weather didn’t stop there. Summers got worse, with temperatures shooting to 45℃, hitting the high 40s and sometimes even crossing 50℃. Rain became unpredictable, swinging from dry, humid weeks to raging, flooding rain. 

Now, almost a decade later, I watch the United Nations General Assembly happening in New York, which is supposedly the highest-stage of global diplomacy, only to see it get hijacked by pseudoscientific claims and fossil fuel/plastic lobbyists. Climate change is dismissed as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated in the world.” Heatwaves, extreme floods, and other climate-related disasters are waved off as things “made by stupid people.”^[1] COP30 is coming up and yet, the hopes of effective and practical actions are very unlikely.  

And weirdly, I don’t feel mad anymore. Because it’s just so normal now. We expect it. Isn’t that why we’re all chronically online anyways? To distract ourselves from the fact that our futures are in the hands of mostly old, endlessly greedy, and definitely stupid people.

I could say there’s hope, that we can fix these problems. But the truth of the matter is, even if we do fix it, there’s going to be more devastation. Climate disasters will keep coming. But we’re privileged. Our neighbours in the Pacific, along with countless low-lying and less developed countries with limited resources and dense populations will face the brunt of it. Just like they have for decades.

[1] Bazzi, Mohamed. “Trump delivered an embarrassing performance at the UN general assembly.” The Guardian. 25 Sept. 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/24/trump-delivered-an-embarassing-performance-at-the-un-general-assembly Accessed 25 Sept. 2025