The UK can count itself lucky we have one day of extreme heat – climate change is being felt more acutely elsewhere

People have long made conversation about the weather; but now it is more commonplace to link extreme weather events to climate change, prompting thoughts about how to fight it

Train passengers in much of Europe are sweltering, the very rails beneath them buckling under the record-breaking heat. Services are being cancelled, commuters asked to stay home, everyone advised to carry water. Though they might not immediately realise or appreciate it, they may count themselves (relatively) lucky. For the current freakish weather is in fact a global phenomenon, and being felt much more acutely elsewhere.

Chennai (formerly Madras) is running out of water. Australia is experiencing a “super drought”, the “worst ever”. The last normal weather year in Australia was 2016. The underwater glaciers of Antarctica are disappearing at an alarming rate. Over recent years we have seen extraordinary tsunamis, tornadoes, rains and extreme cold hit every continent. These are the varied and devastating effects of climate change.

People have long made conversation about the weather; but now it is more commonplace to link extreme weather events to climate change, prompting thoughts about how to fight it. Those trying to deny the effects of this man-made climate emergency are giving up the argument, under the sheer weight of scientific evidence, which provide the objective underpinnings to the anecdotal evidence people experience every day. There are fewer facile newspaper columns about hugging polar bears. The media give less time in the name of a spurious notion of balance to the cranky and unqualified climate change sceptics.

Rather than Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion protesters having to cause havoc and bring the immediacy of the problem to the world’s attention, climate change itself is making the point, and in the most powerful manner. We’re starting to notice what centuries of carbon dioxide and other emissions have done to the planet.

The message is getting through at least in some places. The climate of opinion is becoming more favourable to more radical solutions, and in surprising quarters. In his first, marathon, round of questions in the Commons as prime minister, Boris Johnson was upbraided for hardly mentioning the environment in his first hours in office, and forced to answer questions about the target of carbon neutrality by 2050, one of Theresa May’s last acts before she left office.

It was disappointing that Mr Johnson chose to evade the issue by talking in his typically airy way about technical solutions rather than the “hair shirtism” of the green movement. Still, at least he showed some passing commitment to change. Maybe those few souls blocked the path of his armour-plated Jaguar gave him pause for thought.

Elsewhere, in Trump’s America and in China especially, the world’s largest economies and polluters, the debate seems less urgent, and governments less inclined to put the future of the earth before short-term economic growth, even though this is what will have to be done to make growth sustainable in the long run.

As the inspirational young activist Greta Thunberg says in the essay she has recorded with The 1975, “There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. We are right now at the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis. And we need to call it what it is: an emergency”. According to her logic, the political systems of the world have been demonstrably unable to cope with the sheer scale of the challenges.

It is difficult to argue otherwise, and it is certainly true that, on some readings, all that can be hoped for now is that climate change does not start to run so far out of control that nothing can ever be done about it. If climate change is to be minimised, it will be because the public have at last become slowly convinced that it really is an emergency and they demand that their leaders do seething about it. It is easier for peaceful, lawful protests to influence events in democracies, but even in less liberal regimes public pressure can be brought to bear.

China, in contrast to the United States, is becoming more conscious of the damage environmental degradation inflicts on living standards and health, and is pioneering the world’s progress towards the electrification of transport. In America, perhaps one day the force of sanity will push Donald Trump or his successor to return to the Paris Climate Change accord. It is a race against time, and one that the planet is losing.