Pirate's Cove

Personally, I’d recommend turning on the air conditioning and living in modern world, but, hey, we all know that a 1.5F increase in global temperatures over 170 years is doom

My baby can’t sleep from the heat, why aren’t we talking about climate change?

Irritated and covered in sweat, yet again my two year old daughter is struggling to sleep in her cot. I’ve now lost count of the number of nights that the baby thermometer has scowled at me for putting her to bed in officially dangerous temperatures.

The ongoing heatwave is the main topic of everyday conversation these days, with record-breaking temperatures and wildfires covering newspapers’ front pages and the NHS issuing health warnings for vulnerable groups.

Yet there has been a deafening silence about the likely key driver – climate change.

I am staggered at how difficult it is for us as a society to talk about the links between climate change and extreme weather events like heatwaves. Most people have no problem talking about the links between lung cancer and smoking, even if they aren’t lung cancer specialists. But whenever I’ve brought up the subject of climate change in conversations about the heatwave with people around me, they’ve quickly changed the subject.

Probably to something like “turn the ac on, dumbass.” Unshockingly, this person having this issue, Jamie Clarke, is a climate change activist. So of course he finds this “problem.”