The little Christmas boy is back. El Niño, named after the Christ Child because it usually appears around Christmas, has returned as a Super El Niño. That happens only once every ten to fifteen years, and it has been doing so ever since we started keeping records. Back in 1878, around the time the first automobiles appeared on the streets, there was also a Super El Niño. The world descended into crisis: famine, drought, and some of the most violent storms ever recorded. We may well experience something similar this autumn.

Today I was already grateful that the thermometer stopped at 31°C (88°F), even though the pool water is still 32°C (90°F). We even had a few millimeters of rain. Every drop is welcome in the giant dust bowl we are living in here on Mallorca.

By the end of the week, the temperature is expected to rise above my own body temperature.

“See?” climate skeptics will say. “It was extremely hot in 1878 too. There was a Super El Niño back then as well.”

To be fair, they are partly right.

El Niño has existed for thousands of years. Long before humans influenced the climate, it sometimes brought exceptional heat and drought. The real question is whether that fact actually explains what is happening today. Average global temperatures are already much higher than they were in 1878, even without El Niño. That almost certainly means this Super El Niño will produce even more severe droughts and stronger storms. But to blame El Niño itself, or every wildfire, entirely on climate change is, at the very least, debatable.

The truth is that climate change is not the crisis.

It is one of the most visible symptoms of a much larger systemic crisis.

A few years ago, I was invited to a retreat where I was asked to have a conversation with Professor Bob de Wit of Nyenrode Business University. During the COVID years, he had become a controversial figure because of some of his public statements. The organizers expected a fierce debate between two people with fundamentally different views of the world.

That never happened.

Instead, it became a Socratic conversation. We did not try to convince each other. We first tried to understand why the other person thought the way he did. We continued to disagree about the role of CO₂ and climate change. But the moment we asked what kind of world we hoped to leave behind a hundred years from now, our differences suddenly became much smaller.

We quickly agreed that the greatest challenge is not the climate crisis but a systemic crisis. We agreed that the world has a future only if we stop fighting isolated problems one by one and finally recognize that we are living inside a failing system.

A system in which inequality keeps growing. Where wealth becomes increasingly concentrated. Where nature is treated as though it were free. Where economic growth matters more than healthy ecosystems. Where political polarization makes almost every shared solution impossible.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, migration, financial instability, and rising international tensions appear to be separate problems.

They are not.

They are different symptoms of the same sick system.

Looking back from the future, that may well be the most important lesson. Not that we should shout louder about who is right, but that we should stop fighting over the symptoms and start healing the system together.

Someone looking back from the year 2125 will probably not be surprised by the heat.

They will be surprised that we wasted the precious years in which we could still have acted together on endless polarization. While the political left and right were busy fighting each other, the systemic crisis quietly gained ground every single day.

Back From The Future #40 is part of a series exploring how the world of 2125 might have solved the greatest challenges of our time.