Everyone needs to calm down. It’s a heatwave, not the end of the world. Yes, it’s hot. Temperatures are surpassing 40C in parts of Greece, Italy, Spain, Croatia and Turkey. It was 41C in Seville this week. It might reach 48C on some Med islands, including Sicily and Sardinia. ‘Some scientists believe’, says the Washington Post, that we’re witnessing Europe’s hottest days in 125,000 years. The last time it was this hot there were ‘hippopotamuses in the Thames’, says a breathless BBC. I’m taking it all with a pinch of salt. Right now I’m looking at a New York Times report from 8 August 1933 which said two cities in Spain had just experienced temperatures of 42.5C. It was like a ‘steaming cauldron’, apparently. Heat is as old as time. …

Then there’s the third truth, the most unutterable one: it’s possible that the rising heat of recent years is good for us. For here’s the thing: extreme cold kills far greater numbers than extreme heat. Every year in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 there were on average 800 excess deaths ‘associated with heat’ and 60,500 excess deaths ‘associated with cold’. Around 2,500 people die from heat in the US and Canada every year, compared with around 113,000 from cold. Even in India deaths from cold hugely outnumber deaths from heat. Globally, around 300,000 deaths a year are the result of heat, 1.7million the result of cold.

Why don’t we hear about all these cold deaths?

[There is a fad among activists to pretend that weather just got invented in the last century and that science has calculated a precise temperature for the world. Neither is true. Brendan makes a very good case that we could do better with more heat and less cold, but the truth is that we don’t really control either. The rush to sacrifice our societal goods to the climate gods of the Gaia pantheon is really no different than paganism. It just has better press. — Ed]