We are used to talking about summer heat in our poetry, but it is only when a real spell of it comes to us that we discover how rare it is. This July the whole countryside looks at the same time both strange and familiar. There is the corn, ripe as if it were the middle of August, and the dark foliage of later summer, but all our Northern landscape, unchanged in its forms and objects, is transfigured by the colours of the South. Usually, even in fine summer weather, there is a Northern coolness in our mornings and evenings; but now one is startled even in the early morning by the Southern splendour both of earth and sky

The performance of the British climate over the past few months can at best be described as perfidious. After several very mild winters and two beautiful summers, including the most severe drought since records began 250 years ago, the climate has lurched to the other extreme … the period from September 1976 until last June was the wettest for a hundred years

So what can Britain expect as the blanket of greenhouse gases around the planet thickens? As the temperature nudged record levels last summer, the Met Office said that we should get used to such prolonged periods of settled, dry weather. There is a significant human contribution to these heatwaves because of carbon dioxide emissions over recent decades … This is a sign of things to come … Three years ago … scientists … showed that human emissions of greenhouse gases had more than doubled the risk of record-breaking heatwaves such as the one that is reckoned to have killed 27,000 people across Europe in 2003. […]