Suzanne Harrington: There's a far more deadly heatwave coming to a town near you

We love a hot spell of weather - but do we ever stop to think of the implications?

Suzanne Harrington: the realities of climate change can't be framed as holiday weather anymore. Picture: Denis Scannell

I wish we’d stop calling it a heatwave. It looks like a heatwave and it feels like a heatwave, but to persist in calling it that is like calling Cerberus a dog. Yet we resemble a pub full of alcoholics in our collective denial. 

Every time the temperature breaks a new record, the media normalises it with front pages full of heatwave bingo: ‘Since records began’, ‘phew, what a scorcher’, ‘hottest day ever’, ‘it ain’t half hot, mum’. 

Printing the truth — we are sleep-walking towards self-termination — would probably affect sales. It would bum us out.

So, instead, they print stuff about soaring ice cream and sun cream sales, a run on deckchairs and parasols, on disposable barbeques and canned cocktails, and a photo of a packed beach that isn’t the Costa del Sol, but a formerly windswept outpost down the road, now teeming with paddle boarders and happy sunbathers.

Obviously, ice cream and paddle boarding and sunshine, and blue skies are the stuff of joy. They are why we get on planes to seek out better weather, if only for a fortnight a year — but now the better weather has come to us.

“In other countries, global warming was a threat. In Ireland, it was a fantasy,” writes Fintan O’Toole in his brilliant history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves. 

Anyone who remembers Irish weather pre-climate change — an unending blur of cold-wet-cold-wet, with ‘Irish summer’ being a cruel hoax of maybe three consecutive less-cold, less-wet days in August — will share the fantasy. If any country is crying out for climate change, it’s Ireland.

Meanwhile, in London, the tube network is hotter than Satan’s intestines, with reminders from transport officials to carry water and try not to faint, as it causes delays. You can’t swim anywhere because every body of water, from the London Docks to the local lido, is booked solid. 

I am lucky — I live on the coast, five minutes from the sea, which has not yet been privatised via online booking. I cancel a holiday to the south of France because the south of France has come to my back garden. It is a fantasy come true. So, yes, up here in northern Europe, climate change feels dreamy. As O’Toole says, we don’t know ourselves.

But neither do millions of others — the UN says by 2050 it will be nearer 1.2bn — whose homelands are already uninhabitable. People always think refugees are fleeing war, but millions are climate refugees, whose land has turned to dust, whose cities have become ovens. And so they are forced to move to more inhabitable places — like up here.

This will be the great challenge of our future — not learning to stand up on a paddle board, or negotiate the London Underground when it’s 40˚C in a tunnel, but realising that our sunlit dream-come-true is a climate change nightmare for the global south. We need to share our ice cream with those who most need it — the ones fleeing terminal ‘heatwaves’.