Exactly twenty years ago in May 2006 the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, presented by former US Vice President Al Gore with the fundamental message that global warming is a severe, man-made planetary emergency requiring immediate and radical action. Five years ago in 2021 “Don’t Look Up” was released, the highly dramatised, dark satire using an impending meteor strike as an allegory for the climate crisis and modern political polarisation. Are we living through the next instalment?
May 2026, and something’s up. It’s madly, strangely, hot. The month of May is when we finally shake off winter and move into a blossom filled hedonistic explosion of growth, emerging after months of cold, dark and wet, to light-filled days and gently warming temperatures. Trees and hedgerows are in leaf – that exquisite pale and vibrant lime of new growth known to reduce stress, boost mood, and stimulate cognitive flexibility. The cool wavelength of spring green lowers cortisol, instantly putting the mind at ease. Gardens, the obsession of the British, are bursting with life, and the nation worships at the shrine of the Chelsea Flower Show, the annual Spring jamboree of the Royal Horticultural Society.
Average temperatures for the latter end of the month range from 12 to 20C. But this May we have ricocheted from an unseasonably cold first 3 weeks to record-breaking levels of heat, recording an all-time highest May temperature of 35.1C at London’s Kew Gardens, “an exceptional temperature in the UK even in mid-summer” according to the Meteorological Office.
The UK press is covering the current extreme heat in an interesting way. It’s front-page news of course, after all we are a weather-obsessed nation, and our key conversational gambit is always focused on the need or not to carry an umbrella. Photos of people frolicking in fountains, crowded beaches, smiling ice cream vendors, glorious sunrises and sunsets. However, the image of Jakub Mensik, 26th seeded player at the French Open tennis championships underway at Stade Roland Garros in Paris collapsed on court at the end of the second-round was kept to the sports pages, as was his need for medical attention and eventually being taken off court in a wheelchair. The match lasted over 4 hours in temperatures in the mid-30s, with Jakub falling to the floor as he delivered the winning stroke. His opponent, Mariona Navone crossed the net in the traditional way to congratulate him and help him up, but Mensik was unable to move, saying that his body “just turned off”. Outside of Paris, across all of France the French weather service Méteo-France has been reporting that hundreds of heat records are being broken.
Western Europe is in the grip of an unprecedented Spring heatwave. The extreme temperatures are caused by a high-pressure system centred over the European land mass, creating a “heat dome” where the pressure gets stuck trapping the warm air underneath it. An almost closed loop system is the result. The hot air rises, but the high pressure acts like a lid, pushing the air down again. As the air sinks, it warms yet more by compression, and the heat builds. The ground also warms up, losing moisture and making it easier to heat even more. Until the pressure pattern changes, the high will continue to exacerbate the hot conditions, bringing a risk of wildfires, drought and heat-health issues.
Whilst weather is always variable, especially in the UK squeezed between an ocean and a landmass, there is no doubt that anthropogenic climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels has supercharged the heat. Reams of papers and documents have been published; academic departments are dedicated to research into the science and entire institutes exist to focus on it. The UN has been holding the annual global Climate Change Conference of the Parties since 1995, with COP31 scheduled in November this year, hosted by Turkey. The scientific consensus is indisputable, and the media’s attachment to peppering reports with mealy-mouthed qualifiers coyly shying away from clear statements of fact, makes me question journalistic integrity. What happened to investigative journalism’s quest for truth? Holding truth to power?
And it’s not confined to Europe. In the USA, a major heat wave is sweeping across 22 states this week, pushing thermometers 8-15 degrees above normal with roughly 50 million people coping with 32C weather, or hotter. Whilst these temperatures are not unusual in some US states in July, they are exceptional in May. But the Trump administration has heavily targeted and slashed federal funding for climate research, actively terminating hundreds of scientific grants and withdrawing from foundational international climate agreements like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Major impacts of these policy actions include the freezing or cancellation of thousands of scientific projects, with hundreds of National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants related to climate change and infectious diseases halted; the dismissal of scientists working on the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which provides local information and data to help individual states and towns prepare for extreme weather; the move to dissolve major research facilities such as the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado; and the official withdrawal of the USA from 66 international organisations, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, citing a desire to end taxpayer funding for "radical climate policies".
This creates an unresolved and dangerous tension between what we are experiencing, and what both government policy and the media seem to be telling us. The narrative is increasingly confused; whilst temperature records are not just being broken but smashed through, the mainstream press, TV and streaming news channels are focused on fun and frolics in the sun, rather than the comments and insights from leading voices in climate science. Friederike Otto, Professor of Climate Science at Imperial College London has said that “this record-breaking heat has the fingerprints of climate change all over it”. According to Peter Thorne, leading climate scientist at Maynooth University in Ireland, “we know without a shadow of a doubt that the climate crisis had made heatwaves such as the latest one stronger and more likely. But nevertheless, many of the records being set, particularly in the UK and France, are mind-bogglingly crazy”.
We have just seen the Cannes International Film Festival reach its glamorous finale, preceded a couple of months ago by the Oscars, both celebrations of storytelling at its most compelling. So who’s willing to take on the defining story of our age? Do we need Peter Jackson or Stephen Spielberg, or is it more for James Cameron or Ridley Scott to shock the world into action? Between them they cover fantasy, war epics, sci-fi, mythology, sweeping history and dystopian futures.
Climate change is no longer a remote threat but a present reality, forcing hard decisions about how economies, businesses and societies adapt, mitigate and respond. To paraphrase JFK, we have to choose to do this, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. And we have to do it now.
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