Pascal Yiou remembers the silence of Paris in August 2003, a quietness born not of holiday leisure but of sheer physical exhaustion.
The climatologist watched his instruments register temperatures that felt, to a generation raised on temperate European seasons, like an anomaly from another continent.
Today, those historical peaks look less like an aberration and more like a gentle, cool baseline.
The Shifting Coordinates of Comfort
We normalize the extreme with quiet speed.