Feeling the heat in fight against climate change

If we’re still here in 2048 — and that’s a big if — I’m sure I’ll be tasked with writing a feature 30 years on from the hottest summer on record.

The thing is by that point it will probably only be the 30th hottest summer on record. Every year we seem to be seeing new weather records, whether it be for rainfall, temperature or snow. It’s starting to look like a bit of a pattern.

If the news, broken by Sir David Attenborough earlier this year, that he’d been to see the oceans and they’re almost entirely made of plastic coupled with the revelation last week that typing gobbledygook into Google translate results in a proclamation about the second coming of Jesus hasn’t convinced you we’re heading for the Apocalypse then surely having lived through ‘Furnace Friday’ will have.

I’m writing this on Thursday as a colleague wraps me in ice packs in preparation for my journey home — the same colleague spent an hour five months ago gaffer taping duck feather duvets to my body to allow me to safely traverse the sixth ice age. In between threatening dictators on Twitter and locking children in cages Donald Trump finds time to unpick any positive work in the fight against climate change that he can get his hands on — he really should be applauded for how much he gets done. The problem is that he’s the most powerful man on the planet and if there was much doubt before there’s very little now that climate change is happening and we’re mostly to blame.

He’s a denier though, which is probably a bit like a remainer, and for the entire time he and those in control of the likes of China and India are in office we’ve got no chance.

I’m starting to think Dartford Festival banning non-reusable plastic drinking straws, as well-intentioned as it is, is essentially like bringing a dust pan and brush to the scene of an earthquake.