Well, it is another hot day today.
The type of weather that a few years ago would have prompted the tabloids to pop a giant sun in shades[1] on its front page accompanied by headlines like:
“Phwoar, what a scorcher!”
In The Sun (that home of high-grade journalism) they would also have a model dressed in nothing but a sunhat and a smile, possibly holding a beachball.
Sam, 19, is loving this weather. "It’s hotter than flaming Benidorm!"
Or something vaguely similar.
I would like to think that they still do this, but for real news stories:
Tracey, 21, is seriously worried about the emerging conflict in Iran. "I hope that this does not descend into another military misadventure in the Middle East."
Okay - maybe not.
If You Can’t Stand the Heat …
On the topic of it being too hot - I have seen lately a number of Americans who have found themselves living in the UK finally admitting that Britain in heat is a very different beast than almost anywhere else.
That is because it is.
In these times of climate change, we are seeing temperatures that we used to see occasionally. Usually just before a pleasant summer storm which would see it all crashing down and you could then happily write off summer until the following year.
We just did not do extremes, and as such, on those occasions when we did get hit by unexpected periods of hot, cold, windy, rainy weather we would lose our collective minds and then talk about it for the rest of our lives.
I still occasionally talk about the 1987 storm - nearly forty years on and it will still come up in conversation:
"Remember the neighbours that lost that tree/slates fell off the roof/caravan overturned."
Compare that to anywhere else that gets severe weather, they do not need to talk about it as it will certainly happen, like clockwork, every year.
In Extremis
It is one of the things about the UK that I genuinely liked - extremes were for other people. It is built into the geographical DNA of the place.
Mountains? Not really, compared with the rest of the world we have fancy hills.
Rivers? We those too, but they are outranked by middling rivers in backwaters, of which you will have never heard.
That is not to say that these places cannot be beautiful, as they really are. But on a much smaller scale. I would say more manageable. We also have few of the downsides. We do not have to worry about volcanos, earthquakes or tornadoes that plague other nations.
Now, even with the oncoming storm that is climate change we are not suddenly going to discover a fault line or a dormant earthquake threatening to come to life, but there is a danger that we will start to see people die more frequently as a result of flash floods, baking heat or plunging arctic freezes.
This is dangerous stuff, and yet we continue to wander around as if it isn’t happening.
Missing An Open Goal
We were in Crete last year and we got an alert about a forest fire, not near us thankfully, but it was not newsworthy anywhere else other than locally. I cannot tell you whether there was any loss of property, or worse still, life - but we cannot take it in our stride. This global catastrophe is not fine; it is not natural - no matter what the homicidal lunatic in the White House might say.
It would be lovely if we could stop talking about goals without moving the posts – it would not be so bad if we didn’t keep missing. We have been doing that for the last thirty years.
My generation share a great deal of the blame.
I am afraid we were not present politically when we were young. I was too busy drinking and er ... other things that we do not need to go into here, to become actively engaged. We were partying like the world was not living on borrowed time.
I know, in the scheme of things this is just another coal on the conflagration that is our world right now. But we cannot give up - we need to kick up a stink and let our elected representatives know that what they doing is not good enough.
At the end of this stifling heat, there is a storm coming - but this time it will do little to cool things down.
🧠 What are your thoughts? Is it too late to start fixing things? Are we so dependent on fossil fuels that we may never be able to reverse this crisis?
As ever drop your wisdom below 👇
[1] Although it was unclear why – what is it protecting itself against?
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