Historic heatwave should be feared, not celebrated
IWAS slightly dismayed at how excited people got about this week’s historic news that the UK hit 40C for the first time. To some – and I include a number of my own media colleagues here – there was an almost frenzied build up as the temperatures rose.
Many carried a kind of “will we or won’t we?” approach on Monday as the anticipated figure was touted for the following day.
Then, when it did happen, the front pages spoke for themselves with some even jokingly celebrating the fact.
When the reality is, and I’m sorry to those who might read this and are self-proclaimed climate change deniers, we should be doing precisely the opposite.
Hitting 40C for the first time in the UK’s history is not something to be proud of at all, it’s a grim milestone which puts another nail on the lid of the coffin for the future of our planet.
The reason we experienced it this week is all down to our own making, and no-one will be able to convince me otherwise because the science is there to prove it.
Speaking to the Guardian this week, the Met Office’s Professor Peter Stott said: “I find it shocking that we’ve reached these temperatures today in 2022, smashing the previous record set only in 2019.”
The same article said that the professor’s research in 2020 showed there was a chance of the UK hitting 40C due to global heating.
He told the newspaper: “But we calculated it as a relatively low likelihood – a roughly one in a hundred chance – albeit that those chances are increasing rapidly all the time with continued warming.
“Breaking 40C is very worrying; we’ve never seen anything like this in the UK and it could be that the risk of such extreme heat is even greater than our previous calculation showed.”
All of us were disrupted in some way by this week’s heatwave, be it our health, our work, our leisure or travel plans.
The rail company I use to get to Derby each day advised us not to travel unless it was absolutely necessary, and so I worked from home, linking into the courtrooms remotely and picking up cases that way rather than physically being in the building.
Figures we were sent by Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service showed how 999 emergency call
handlers for the county and Nottinghamshire dealt with an increase of over 312 per cent of calls in the 48-hour period since the start of the heatwave, with calls at one point being diverted to Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service due to the high demand and call numbers.
It said how, since one minute past midnight on Monday, July 18, until 2.30pm on Tuesday, 999 call handlers received 906 calls for emergency assistance across the two counties.
The average number of 999 calls received in a 24-hour period is normally 110, the service said.
Fires raged across parts of Derbyshire and I am sure many of you, like me, watched the news of other blazes across the country, including one alongside the A2 at Dartford which was very uncomfortable viewing.
Schools were closed, meaning parents and guardians had to take time off work to look after their children, potentially losing much needed cash in the process.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t subscribe to the train of thought that “we didn’t get a day off work during the drought of 1976”.
I lived through it, I was young, I recall a long walk in the Lake District with my parents and sister where I suffered heat stroke and was sick.
Perhaps, just maybe, we were wrong not to be given a day off work in 1976?
This week, speaking to the media, Dr Friederike Otto at Imperial College London said: “It is in our hands whether every future heatwave will continue to be extremely deadly and disruptive.
“We have the agency to make us less vulnerable and redesign our cities, homes, schools and hospitals and educate us on how to keep safe.”
This week’s historic heatwave was nothing to be celebrated.
It is something to be feared.