The "dangerous summer"

It looks like the heatwave hysteria is going to cool down soon.

At the risk of getting a bit meta-ironic, I was writing recently about how annoying I found the green agenda forcing discussion into a repetitive cycle. I’ve written quite a stack of articles about heatwaves now. I observed it quite a while ago that nothing can really alter the climate debate — such as it is — because it isn’t a debate. The best result you can get from a discussion with meteorologists about the non-lethality of weather events is for them to return with a slightly modified metric. For example, when the promised “increased frequency and intensity of storms” did not materialise in the data, claims were made that now storms were simply moving more slowly, causing more devastation. At some point you realise the point of this ‘science’ is to sustain the narrative, not develop an understanding of the phenomena.

If you’re still unsure… My point is that they cannot really explain how weather, even extreme weather, can become so terrible that society cannot function, such that the radical reorganisation of society and the economy, and the suspension of democratic politics, is an urgent necessity, or what remains of civilisation will collapse.

One trick in the arsenal of those trying to sustain the claim is to draw you into their religious tendency to look for signs. The European heatwave of 2003, for example, not unlike the subsequent Hurricane Katrina that pummelled New Orleans, served for a number of years as evidence of Gaia’s wrath. Tens of thousands of people died, this story claims. And now those deaths are on you, denier!

It’s as if we deniers do not argue that there should be air conditioning, that society should be wealthy enough to look after its senior and infirm population, and that there should be water infrastructure including desalination plants and reservoirs. But try having all that without fossil fuels. The simple fact of the matter is that “climate change” is a more convenient explanation for slightly premature deaths than neglect, abuse and indifference.

Repeat for every “natural disaster” of any kind — planners, policymakers, politicians are let off the hook by the notion of a changing environment. The repetitive news cycle, prefigured by the ideological portent, precludes any deeper discussion than the role of human agency — is it climate change or not? Well of course it bloody well is…

The proper answer to the question “is it anthropogenic climate change” in stories about seemingly “extreme” weather, despite the predominance of World Weather Attribution, is:

• We do not know.

• We cannot know.

• It doesn’t make any difference.

It doesn’t make any difference because there are no metrics that could make a difference to civil planning as policy. As I’ve pointed out before, if you base your plans on probabilistic forecasts, you’re almost certainly going to go wrong. It may well be getting wetter, but failing to prepare for drought would be catastrophic. We may well have just experienced the highest temperatures, but they were nothing that could not have been anticipated, even without the story of global warming, and they say nothing about the necessity of being prepared for a winter such as that of 1963. That is to say that all weather is possible. Probability is irrelevant to planning, other than for week-ahead contingencies.

The idea haunting such narratives, even where they talk of “adaptation” as policy, seems to presuppose something as radical as taking some Thames Valley local authority, and then suddenly asking it to do its job as if it were managing the same civil infrastructure, but in the remotest parts of Siberia. No, darlings, it’s going to be a degree or two warmer, in a century, maybe. That’s it — that’s the ‘catastrophe’. We are the nation of Keep-Calm-and-Carry-on posters, of other WWII allusions and pastiches, of James Bond films that remind us of our important place in the world. Indeed, we are the global climate leaders! We can surely do this without all this constant whingeing!

But so much of this excreta comes from Universities, where green blobbery raises no eyebrows — only resistance to it does. The world is upside down, after all. And that’s why I wasn’t particularly surprised to read this absolute crap emerge from a fake scientist from Imperial College:

“It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers. To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”

Not even a “dangerously hot heatwave”, the contention was a “dangerously hot summer”.

Only academics are capable of producing stuff so very far from reality. Meanwhile, away from the air-conditioned offices and libraries of Imperial College, tens of millions of people got on with their lives…. Some of them slightly uncomfortable, but none of them in any greater peril than on any other day of the year.

Dangerous?! Surely this is word-play.

“Dangerous” is rock climbing. “Dangerous” is reckless driving. “Dangerous” is fishing in open, wild seas. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then any of these things is very likely fatal. But fortunately, most of us know what we’re doing when we take risks, such as living.

I’d love to know what such people think “safe” weather is. Here is the weather forecast for next Friday, for my town. It’ll be 23 degrees at its hottest, some time after noon — the heatwave of near or above 30 degrees C have gone.

But is this ‘safe’ weather?

Well, I’m sorry to disappoint the Imperial Collegers, but this is actually extremely dangerous weather. Before approximately 9am and after midnight on Friday, humans lacking clothing and shelter will likely die. At 15 degrees C, the human body is not able to sustain temperature, and many will succumb to hypothermia within just a few hours.

Some cynical science deniers might counter that humans do have shelter and clothing, as cultural rather than biological adaptations to our environment. Indeed, cleverclogs, and now we have fans and aircon, too. You understand? There’s no such thing as “dangerous weather”, because there’s no such thing as “safe weather” — there’s only the failure to do what every human inhabitant of these islands has done for 900,000 years: burned a tree when it’s cold, or stayed in the cave when it’s a bit hot, and made sure there’s a spring nearby without too much sheep shit in it. Everything is dangerous.

The idea of a “dangerous summer” is so ahistorical, so anti-civilisational, so unscientific, so regressive and bonkers, it ought to crack apart the ivory towers, to bring its silly bricks back down to Earth. There ought not to be an eyebrow on 67 or so million faces that is not raised by the bullshit being cooked up by our betters. It puts a question mark over the entire enterprise of institutional science that this claim was not shot down, with extreme prejudice, from its own camp.

But ideology is an extremely powerful drug and money — lots and lots and lots of lovely green blob moolah — is an extremely effective lubricant. And “science” is the most whopping of all fig leaves.

Here’s my recent piece on heatwave bullshit for the Daily Sceptic. I long for the days when we can just enjoy — or even merely suffer — a heatwave without it being made an ideological weapon.

It has been quite warm. And on some people’s views, this is a sign of things to come – slightly warmer weather means that Britain is going to be torn from her foundations by the elements that made her. Yet the heatwave, which, after all, as far as most people are concerned, is merely holiday weather, makes for a poor harbinger for that reason. It’s like calling a windfall of cash a sign of looming poverty. So the Green Blob requires a ritual, and therefore that the bodies be found and paraded in front of the press such that fingers can be pointed and Gaia’s wrath invoked against those who dare utter otherwise. Nobody should be allowed to remember the warm days of June and July 2026 fondly.

Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them. “Using historical mortality records and established peer-reviewed methods,” which “build on previously published research”, these ‘researchers’ found that “550 heat-related deaths occurred in England and Wales during the May heatwave” and “2,200 during the June heatwave”.

According to the press release:

Dr Clair Barnes, Research Associate in Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Imperial College London, said: “It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers. To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”

And this, my friends, is how we can know for absolute sure that climate change is bullshit, even if it’s real, and even if Britain’s hat-trick of heatwaves in 2026 was caused by it. Because, even if climate change and the heatwaves were real, the deaths were not. As one might expect from the trinity of the LSHTM/Imperial/Met Office, all is not as it seems.

The deaths were made up.