The year the Earth caught fire

The premise of the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire was that simultaneous testing of atom bombs altered the axis of rotation of the planet, causing runaway global warming. Even to a non-scientist, this was implausible considering the mass of the earth and the relatively puny size of even the largest man-made explosion. (Actual scientists were more worried about the cooling effects on the thin skin of atmosphere of frequent atomic explosions, culminating in the nuclear winter theory of the 1970s and '80s. It was not for many years that it was realised that the effects of global warming would more than counterbalance that.) The later scenes of the British sci-fi classic, showing a parched Hyde Park, eerily pre-echoed newsreel footage of the effect of the recent record-breaking heatwave.

On the west coast of North America, wildfires of an intensity not seen before continue to rage. There are even wildfires within the Arctic Circle in Sweden.The monsoon and typhoons in the Far East have been more devastating than before. It is clear that there is a process of global warming, something that even hard-line climate change deniers are beginning to admit. What they continue to reject, as David TC Davies did on Sunday Supplement yesterday, is that human activity has anything to do with it. They point to previous eras in Earth's history when there were warm periods.

The fact is that the last time the whole planet was this hot was millions of years ago, before homo sapiens came on the scene. Even the much-cited mediaeval warm period was a localised phenomenon, affecting the North Atlantic region while overall the world was cooler than it is today. What is worrying, and tending to corroborate the anthropogenic model of climate change, is that the current rate of increase in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is the highest for 66 million years.

Whatever the mechanism, the fact of global warming is now hardly disputed and there is little that we can do to mitigate it in the short term. We need to take measures now to cope with it. We need to return to the high ceilings of yesteryear in classrooms and hospital wards. New builds need to incorporate passive cooling, as in traditional middle eastern construction. The especially vulnerable, the very old and the very young, need to be taken care of. The laissez-faire attitude of Tories like David TC Davies is not good enough.