The heatwave: a sign of what’s to come?

For people who like to discuss the weather it has been quite a summer. Last Friday, the UK’S extraordinary five-week-long heatwave came to a dramatic (if temporary) halt when the skies opened and temperatures plunged by up to ten degrees overnight, said The Independent. In parts of Northern Ireland, a month’s worth of rain fell in hours, causing serious flooding; in Dorset, Camp Bestival was so battered by winds, it had to close; trains were cancelled after lightning knocked out the signals, as were several flights. But if the rain brought misery to some, to others it brought relief from the relentless heat. Last week the UK was the hottest place in Europe. Fire services were called to hundreds of grass fires; in London, commuters endured furnace-like temperatures of up 42°C on the Tube’s Central line; and on the railways, trains on several busy lines were cancelled, or slowed down to a crawl, because of fears that the tracks might buckle in the heat.

In Japan, it has been so hot they’ve declared it a natural disaster; there have been devastating wildfires from the Arctic Circle to California; and a new temperature record has been set for Africa. Is climate change to blame? Scientists are rightly cautious “about drawing a straight line” between a period of hot weather and “global fluctuations of climate”, said The Times. Within every era “there is a great deal of volatility”. But it’s quite clear that something is “lurking in the shadows” – and as a committee of MPS warned this week, we need to adapt for a future in which heatwaves are a lot more common. We need employers to relax their dress codes; we need to stop surfacing major roads in materials that melt in the sun; and we need to ensure our buildings are properly ventilated (too many hospitals in particular are designed to keep heat in rather than let it out.) If we can adapt to the heat, it will buy us time to find a solution to climate change.

One thing we mustn’t do is “bury our heads in our sweaty hands”, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Real progress has been made in, for instance, developing renewable energy; but when governments are distracted by more obviously pressing crises, they’ll only focus on a problem as complex as climate change if voters insist on it. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, over 90% of British people accept that climate change is happening; trouble is, only 25% are very worried about it. That may change. We’re used to the weather coming after the news. When it starts leading the news, voters may start to demand action from our politicians.