From my Substack diary for Saturday, 20th. June 2026

The kitchen door is open to allow cool air indoors; it is only about 3 degrees cooler than inside the home but that is a sufficient temperature difference to provide comfort and a gentle cool breeze. We are on the eve of a heatwave today so I need to make every effort to cool the house down, to ensure that the heat will not add to the already warmer temperatures indoors.

Although my home is far from ideal in terms of architecture, build and internal layout I have learned to minimise heat gain quite well during a heatwave. At a personal level that is important for health. My concern is always and increasingly with food. As heatwaves become more frequent and more intense – and indeed begin to coalesce geographically – an increasing number of crops are failing in an increasing number of countries. It is only a matter of time before prices rise, scarcity increases and crops are protected for local consumption. Panic buying, hoarding and food riots are the inevitable outcome.

Thankfully we are not there yet, except in parts of the world where desertification is already converting crops into sand, and in parts of the world where an increasing number of wildfires are converting crops into ash.

I knew at the beginning of the millennium that this would become the new normal in the second half of this century. As did hundreds of thousands of climate and other scientists in every country on the planet. We also knew that we could do something about it. But to this day I do not know why we have done nothing to prevent it. We haven’t even done the most obvious, basic and common-sense thing of all, which is to terminate the cause. Stop burning fossil fuels. How simple do you want it to be?