I found myself sitting in front of a fan last Thursday, unable to concentrate, unable to sleep the night before, mildly nauseous from the heat, thinking about how extraordinarily fragile we are. Not emotionally, physically or biologically, but as a species.
The UK broke its June temperature record three consecutive days in a row this week, peaking at 37.3C at Santon Downham in Suffolk on 26 June, smashing the previous record of 35.6C set in 1976. The Met Office issued only its second ever Red Extreme Heat Warning, noting that health impacts were likely “for many, even beyond those who are normally more vulnerable.” Not the elderly. Not the ill. Everyone! That last detail is the one worth digging into because it contains, buried inside a meteorological briefing, an admission about the human body no one ever speaks about: we are not built for this. We never were.
The human body’s entire thermoregulatory system exists to maintain temperature within remarkably narrow limits. When that balance tips toward net heat gain and cannot be corrected, body temperature rises unrestrained. We sweat. We vasodilate. We gasp. And when the air around us is already saturated with moisture (as it was this week, with dew points reaching approximately 22C) far exceeding the single-figure dew points of the record-breaking July 2022 heatwave, even sweating stops working. The cooling mechanism that evolution gave us simply fails. We are, at that point, in genuine biological crisis, and there is nothing our intelligence can do about it in the moment except find shade, find water, find a room we have mechanically cooled using technology we invented precisely because our bodies cannot cope unaided.
Just stop and think about that for a moment. The species that split the atom, sequenced the genome, built the internet and landed on the moon requires a fan and a glass of water to survive a Thursday afternoon in Suffolk.
We are, beneath the remarkable architecture of our civilisation, astonishingly delicate. Our viable temperature range (the band within which we can function without mechanical or technological assistance) is narrow to the point of embarrassment. We cannot photosynthesize. We cannot hibernate. We cannot shed our skin or slow our metabolism or do any of the things that other species do to adapt to environmental change. We adapt the environment instead, which is simultaneously our greatest achievement and, increasingly, our most dangerous habit.
A study published by the University of Reading found that 4.3% of English homes have air conditioning and that the people most at risk from heat are the ones least likely to have it. Homes where someone is over 75, the group facing the greatest health risk in a heatwave, have the lowest rate of air conditioning of any demographic. We have engineered a situation in which the most vulnerable people are the least protected, and we have done so in a country whose building stock was designed for a climate that no longer exists.
Professor Stephen Belcher, Met Office Chief Scientist, said this week: “To see temperatures like this in the UK in June is sobering. Events like this bring home the implications of climate change, with very high temperatures and humidity bringing significant health implications from heat stress.” What he means, is that we are watching the consequences of our own choices arrive, on schedule, exactly as predicted, and we are still not ready for them.
Here is the question that has been nagging at me. We are, by any reasonable measure, the most cognitively sophisticated species this planet has ever produced. We identified the mechanism of climate change in the nineteenth century. We have understood its trajectory with increasing precision for fifty years. We have held summit after summit, signed agreement after agreement, published report after report. We know, with a certainty that is essentially absolute, that burning fossil fuels is destabilising the climate systems that make this planet habitable for us and for virtually everything else alive on it.
And we have continued doing it. Because it is profitable. Because the infrastructure is already built. Because the political will to confront the people who benefit most from the status quo has, in almost every country and almost every era, proved insufficient.
At least 19 people died in water-related incidents during the May 2026 heatwave alone, as the UK recorded its hottest May day since records began. Schools closed. Rail networks buckled. Surface temperatures in parts of London reached between 50 and 65C. A hosepipe ban was announced for 850,000 households in Kent. And the ECMWF model, the most reliable long-range forecasting tool available, is already suggesting another heat dome in July.
This is not a future problem. This is now!
The renewable heating industry sits at an interesting intersection of this crisis. Heat pumps can cool as well as heat. Air-to-air systems, in particular, offer genuine year-round climate management for a fraction of the energy cost of conventional air conditioning. The technology exists. The grants exist, to a degree. The knowledge exists. And yet the UK’s heat pump grant schemes have, until very recently, excluded air-to-air devices entirely, the one category of system that directly addresses the overheating crisis we are currently living through.
We have built a heating-obsessed policy framework in a country that is rapidly becoming too hot to live in comfortably for several weeks of the year. We have insulated homes to retain warmth without adequately considering what happens when you trap heat inside an airtight box in 37-degree humidity. We have a Warm Homes Plan and no Warm Summers Plan, because until very recently the idea that Britain might need one seemed faintly absurd.
It does not seem absurd now.
The question of whether money will continue to triumph over survival is not rhetorical. It has a real answer, and we are living it. The fossil fuel industry received $7 trillion in global subsidies in 2022 alone, according to the IMF… more than the entire GDP of every country in Africa combined. The five largest oil companies posted combined profits of over $200 billion in the same year that 3,000 people died of heat in Britain. The maths are not complicated. The priorities are not hidden. They are just, somehow, still acceptable.
We are the cleverest species on this planet. We are also, right now, at the end of June, in Suffolk, in 37-degree heat, sitting in front of a fan wondering what went wrong. We know what went wrong. We’ve known for decades. The only question left is whether knowing is enough.
The Met Office Chief Forecaster said last week that the exceptional heat is “another marker on how climate change is shifting the dial on temperature extremes in the UK.” Another marker. As if we needed more.
