The Economist’s take was “The rise of the truly cruel summer/ Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it”. The dateline was June 26, 2024, on which the actual high in London was 82F or 27.7C; at time of writing the high was 68F or 20C. In one sense the summer has been brutal. Namely for those who wanted all scorching all the time and even proclaimed it ahead of time. As Climate Change Dispatch observed, despite a prediction of “summer of hell with almost complete certainty” in Europe, Germany had below-average temperatures in June. It wasn’t even hot everywhere in the United States. Which AP made all about climate with “Much of US braces for extreme weather, from southern heat wave to possible snow in the Rockies” and spoke of a “chaotic weather map”. Atop a dogmatic climate one in which everything including rain in Florida is due to you-know-what: “The damaging no-name storm system coincided with the early June start of hurricane season, which this year is forecast to be among the most active in recent memory amid concerns that climate change is increasing storm intensity.” Not that storm intensity is increasing. But who cares?

The year of 2024 will stand out forever in human memory for the way it got hot in midsummer everywhere except where it didn’t. Alarmists couldn’t get enough of it; Bill Nye of the blowtorch demo and mouth enthused that “we have a situation where we’re going to have this extreme heat and these crazy heat domes, these high-pressure systems that don’t move, and there are no clouds to reflect sunlight into space; they just get hotter and hotter”. Reuters “Weekend Briefing” email shrilled “Summer heat scorches the northern hemisphere” and its “Sustainable Switch” shrieked “The cross-over between climate change and its impact on health is the focus of today’s newsletter as extreme heat waves have taken the lives of hundreds in India and Saudi Arabia this week.” They’re just reveling in it.