Alarming heat levels are being reached in many countries

There is some confusion over the debate around climate change, as if it is only one between scepticism and orthodoxy.

In fact very few people who study the climate deny the fact that temperatures are warming.

Very few people who study the matter deny that human emissions have contributed to that warming.

The serious debate relates to the extent of the warming. And to the extent of the human contribution.

In other words, the world is getting hotter and people have clearly helped make it so. But we do not know how hot it is getting and whether, in the absence of human factors, it would have been heating in a natural cycle in any event.

However, there is hardly room for complacency. Recent extremes of weather have been very disturbing. Think for example of increasingly terrifying wildfires in the US west, one of which (Camp fire, 2018) killed almost 100 people.

Or of the way in which the previous hottest day ever in Canada was not merely beaten last year, but smashed – when on three consecutive days the previous 45C record, which stood for 84 years, was beaten until a new 50C record was set.

Watch out for England today, which had its third hottest day on record yesterday, of 38.1C, perhaps touching 40C.

Although many parts of the world regularly hit 40C in their hottest months, such heat is particularly gruelling in Britain because of high humidity. And it is dangerous.

In Northern Ireland we formerly hit 30C only rarely, but have done now in two consecutive years. The reading of 31.1C yesterday in Fermanagh would, just over a year ago, have been NI’s hottest ever day (until last year a 31.3C record was set).

That is very hot, but well short of southern England.

Is this going to be the pattern for the future? If it is, the world faces huge environmental, societal and resource challenges. This Province will not be exempt from the pain.

But we might at least have the small consolation of living in a tolerable climate, one that could even come to be seen as enviable by people in other countries.