Chris Green MP: Learning to adapt to enjoy the heat

The glorious summer we have been enjoying has delighted some people but for all the wrong reasons
Bolton West MP Chris Green Bolton West MP Chris Green
Bolton West MP Chris Green

Every so often, we get a spell of wonderful hot weather whilst the schools are on holiday and this year has been one of those times.

It is a great chance for families to get together and enjoy the great outdoors rather than be sitting indoors and staring out the window.

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Whether it has been the kids playing in a paddling pool in the garden, families going for country walks or enjoying a pub’s beer garden, it has been a great few days.

I am looking forward to the rain to cool us down and water the gardens and farmers’ fields, but the really worrying dark clouds seem to be elsewhere.

When the warm weather was initially forecast, the media and more extreme environmental political agitators were telling us that it was a disaster and that it would bring misery to the masses.

A warm summer could only be the result of the worst excesses of climate change and that governments around the world would have to redouble their efforts to halt it – mostly by increasing our taxes.

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We were told that the weak and vulnerable would succumb en masse as though people who had lived for three score and 10 summers could no longer work out how to cope.

Some of the prophets of doom could not even understand that the people they were claiming to defend actually like going on holiday to Spain where it is often far hotter.

It used to be that the broadcasters would report the facts that we have hot weather and that people are on the beach enjoying it.

Now, they use it to spread fear that neither we nor the world can cope.

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Globally, a hundred years ago, there would be almost half a million annual deaths related to the climate but that has plummeted to being under 20,000 in recent years.

Whether it is the heat or cold, floods or drought, hurricanes or cyclones, we have learned to adapt and even take advantage and enjoy the weather and the climate we have.

The Office for National Statistics UK figures show that mortality related to climate over our warmest months has consistently gone down.

The impression from the media is that we are suffering more, when the reality is that we are coping better.

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Much of the media is showing its southern bias again when observing this warm spell.

Yes, the south east has always been hotter than Lancashire, but their hosepipe ban does not mean that the warm weather is bad.

The last new reservoir built in the UK was in 1991, but we have seen a huge population growth at the same time.

When politicians wonder how much they want our taxes go up to fight climate change, they should stop, chill out, enjoy the weather and ask themselves how much they have done to create the problems in the first place.