It is actually hotter in London right now than in Marrakech, Islamabad, Havana and possibly quite soon, Cairo. This week, the Met Office issued a warning that temperatures might reach up to 40°C in parts of Britain – heat the country is far from ready for. Caught beneath British bureaucracy and a fetish for heritage, there is no remedy to the extreme heat waves that are becoming an annual occurrence.
In other cities around the world, infrastructure and labour laws are designed to keep populations safe. El Paso, for instance, is being warned of temperatures “ranging between 102 and 107 degrees” (38.9°C to 41.7°C). While dealing with the same heat, El Paso operates cooling centres such as public libraries, and employs a style of air conditioning called ‘swamp cooling’ that is cheaper to install and more environmentally friendly, using a fan and water reservoir to blow damp, cool air into a room. Britain, by contrast, remains stuck in old buildings designed to insulate, with workers kept there by insufficient legislation.
“London is hotter than Marrakech as the Met Office warns of 40°C, exposing Britain's lack of cooling infrastructure.”
The case for air conditioning in Britain is plagued by hypocrisy and debates on conservation: to nullify the ever-increasing heat, one must contribute more to its root cause. Architectural purists denounce the modernisation of buildings ‘listed’ for historical importance. Meanwhile, political leadership is lacking. While Nigel Farage and Reform UK may not outwardly denounce climate change as a hoax, the pledge to “Scrap Net Zero and Related Subsidies” speaks for itself. Reform’s last general election manifesto reads: “We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it.”
But the risks a heat wave poses are not trivial. Almost four years ago, Richard Seymour expressed the fatal reality of these synthetic catastrophes. Now, extreme heat waves really are the new normal. But they shouldn’t be normalised, argue Bob Ward and Emma Howard Boyd of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE. Boyd wrote in a press release: “This week’s extreme temperatures risk losses to the economy of hundreds of millions of pounds due to lower productivity.”