Heatwaves: The New Normal? (BBC2)
Marilyn Monroe started a heat-wave in 1954, by ‘letting her seat wave’, in a fiery number from the musical There’s No Business Like Show Business. ‘Her anatomy, made the mercury, jump to 93!’
But to hear the BBC tell it, you’d think there was no such thing as a heatwave before climate change.
Weather presenter Sarah Keith-Lucas was having a meltdown in Heatwaves: The New Normal? as she predicted wildfires sweeping the UK and ‘extreme heat’ with ‘extreme consequences’.
This was the language of hysteria, matched with pictures of burned-out houses and forest infernos. ‘When Los Angeles burned, home after home was razed to the ground,’ she warned. ‘In Australia, hundreds have died and millions of hectares devastated as a result of bushfires.’
Britain, too, could be on the verge of similar heatwave hell, Sarah believes, thanks to ‘human-induced climate change’.
We cut to clips of anxious members of the public, voicing fears of ‘climate collapse’. A buildings expert declared that old buildings with the wrong sort of windows ‘will just become uninhabitable’.
How this will happen, he didn’t explain. Maybe he was worried about rusty hinges that won’t open. But a bit of WD-40 will fix that, and it’s cheaper than abandoning your home and moving into an air-conditioned refuge.
Temperatures above 26°C could cause thousands of deaths, Sarah claimed, citing the Office for National Statistics. Before climate change, a week of 26°C used to be known as ‘summer’. Now, it’s the end of civilisation.
Sarah Keith-Lucas was having a meltdown as she predicted wildfires sweeping the UK and ‘extreme heat’ with ‘extreme consequences’
Temperatures above 26°C could cause thousands of deaths, Sarah claimed, citing the Office for National Statistics
This was the language of hysteria, matched with pictures of burned-out houses and forest infernos
Sarah did admit that a heatwave happened in 1976, though she reported it as a moment of national crisis, with police evacuating countless people from their homes, probably because they couldn’t open their windows.
But the problem, according to Candice Howarth — spokeswoman for the Quadrature Climate Foundation — is that ‘we culturally and historically aren’t used to heatwaves in the UK’.
I’m sure she’s right. Cinema-goers in the Fifties probably came out scratching their heads and saying, ‘You know what, Doris, culturally and historically I’ve got no idea what Marilyn Monroe was singing about.’
The reality is that anything can become an alarming new phenomenon if it’s served with a spin of panic. Sarah took us into her BBC weather studio, a cubbyhole with a camera and a green screen, and showed us a map on which the jet stream locked Britain under a ‘heat dome’.
As the temperatures rose, the colours on the map turned a more vivid red. By the time it hit 30°C (86°F), the UK was glowing fire-alarm crimson.
Then she met a farmer who was planning to cope with ‘weather extremities’ by planting a vineyard. Sadly, Sarah was left holding an empty bottle because the vines haven’t produced grapes yet.
Overhead, the sky was a morose grey. Have a good worry about heatwaves if you want, but don’t forget to take a brolly.
