© Getty Images
If you find yourself wondering over the next few days why it is so swelteringly hot, I have an answer for you. It's because of rich people. It's because of those wealthy elites with all their gas-guzzling vehicles and reckless holidaymaking. It's their fault you're sweating on the Tube.
This infantile claim really is being made, and by supposedly serious politicians. Labour's Richard Burgon, over on his Instagram account, is wringing his no doubt sweaty hands over the filthy rich folk who apparently landed us in this weather apocalypse.
'As we face 40°C temperatures and the first ever Red Extreme Heat Warning, remember this climate crisis is driven by the wealthy', he cries.
His stern words are accompanied, naturally, by that Met Office map showing half of Britain coloured dark red - the hellish hue that has been chosen to illustrate how dire our predicament has allegedly become.Is anyone else tiring of all this
green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next - plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?
The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become.
Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth. These people really do view hot weather as an indictment of humanity, and a forewarning of the imminent heat death of our world that we've brought about with all our evil pollution and consumption.
They're all at it. Caroline Lucas says, 'The climate emergency is right here, right now'.
One observer describes Europe as a 'continent on fire' - which just isn't true, is it? - and says the hot weather is proof of 'the ravages of climate change'. The words
'heatwave hell' are appearing everywhere, and
many in the opinion-forming set know exactly who's responsible for this hell: me and you and everyone else who has dared to live modern, technological lives.
Comment: Unusually cold airmass blows through Bering Strait bringing July snow