My second daughter turns 100 days old this week. For 25 of those days the temperature has exceeded 30°C somewhere in Britain. She has spent a quarter of her life experiencing a heat that, in the past, it would only have been possible to feel if her parents were prepared to negotiate an airport and short-haul flight. In London, where we live, only seven days have been colder than 15°C. This is not normal. Wildfires are raging across our continent: as I write, a fire the size of the Isle of Wight is burning outside Bordeaux and hundreds of thousands of people are being evacuated. Strategic military aircraft are water bombing for the first time in their operational history. The ground is burning in North Wales. This. Is. Not. Normal.
But then again, it is now. “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal,” the lead author of the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report, Mike Kendon, said on its publication on 14 July. It’s a good time to own a swimming pool or a vineyard in Kent, where the great Champagne houses are quietly buying up all they can. Perhaps it’s also a good time to own a hotel in Cornwall or Suffolk, if our love affair with the Mediterranean begins to wilt in the heat of Europe’s summer furnace. And yet, let’s be serious for a second: none of this is actually good. It’s not a good time to be a farmer or a firefighter or, more to the point, anyone forced to live and work in the blistering temperatures now common across much of the world beyond our shores, many of whom will – increasingly – look for ways to escape to cooler climes.