We’ve just enjoyed our first blissful sleepover weekend with our 20-month granddaughter, Hazel, so maybe that softened me up.
Or perhaps it had been a week’s leave faraway from the news that rusted my BBC armour of emotional detachment from the climate story.
Either way, I confess to a gut-tightening sense of foreboding when Hazel left and that i trapped with North America’s killer heat dome on TV.
That’s not because new record temperatures were set within the north-western US and Canada – that happens from time to time. No, it’s because old records were smashed so dramatically.
The previous all-time Canada record of 45C was set within the 1937 geographical area era when, like this year, the parched ground did not mitigate temperatures.
Normally records like this are over-topped by a fraction of a degree, but this year the previous high was obliterated on three days running.
The final temperature within the town of Lytton was fully 4.6C above the old record. Emissions from human activities inarguably contributed to the increase , increasing global average temperature by about 1.2C since the late 1800s.
US-Canada heatwave: Visual guide to the causes
Climatologists are nervous of being accused of alarmism – but many are frankly alarmed for a few time now.
“The extreme nature of the record, along side others, may be a cause for real concern,” says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian Hoskins. “What the climate models project for the longer term is what we might get if we are lucky. The model’s behaviour could also be too conservative.”
In other words, in some places it’s likely to be even worse than predicted.
Map showing the most well liked areas in Canada and therefore the US north-west
Computer models are what scientists use to undertake to second-guess the longer term behaviour of Earth’s climate. But they take a really broad look out on the worldwide temperatures – they do not focus in on smaller areas where the projected temperature extremes could also be over-topped… extreme extremes, if you wish .
Scientists are now striving to predict a number of these crazy weather events that are currently taking policy-makers all of sudden .
It’s not just heat waves, but also pulses of torrential rain that cause devastating floods on an area level. Drains were built when no-one thought a harmless gas like CO2 could wreak havoc.
The UK Met Office hopes its shiny new mega computer are going to be ready to make projections on a way more closely defined scale, although some are going to be sceptical about its ability to try to to that.
Meanwhile, temperatures keep rising and shifting scientific goalposts. What’s more, Canada’s extreme extreme (sic) was cranked up by a worldwide temperature rise of just 1.2C thus far on pre-industrial levels.
But the planet is perhaps heading for 1.5C of heating early next decade, and temperatures will push onwards to 2C and above unless policies transform . What can we imagine things are going to be like with an increase of 2C, which was until recently considered to be a comparatively “safe” level of change?
Baroness Worthington, a lead author on the UK’s global climate change Act, told me: “Concerned scientists are not any longer concerned – they’re freaked out.
“They’re worrying there won’t be a ‘safe landing’ on the climate. We are performing on the thought of safe carbon budgets (the amount of carbon we will put into the atmosphere without badly disrupting the climate). But what if there’s no safe carbon budget?
“What if the ‘safe’ carbon budget is zero. we will not sugar-coat the potential realities of this.”
Politicians are working to avert the worst of these potential realities, but even the previous UK prime minister Thatcher remarked within the late 1980s that creating such an experiment with our only planet was folly.
Margaret Thatcher: How PM legitimised green concerns
In 1989 she riveted the UN together with her warning that greenhouse gases were “changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways”.
Mrs Thatcher – formerly a search chemist – continued: “The result’s that change in future is probably going to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we’ve known hitherto. it’s comparable in its implications to the invention of the way to split the atom. Indeed, its results might be even more far-reaching.
“It is not any good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We shall only achieve handling the issues through a huge international, co-operative effort.”
This was extraordinarily prescient, and her words were even more devastating from the lips of a towering, right-wing world leader who couldn’t be dismissed as a fretful hippy.