02.07.2026

Preparing for the worst

Record heatwaves in the UK and across Europe provide a grim harbinger of things to come, writes Eddie Ford. Meanwhile far-right ideologues demonise Ed Miliband because of his commitment to achieving net zero by 2050

We have just experienced a ‘scorcher’ that has seen records tumble, both in the UK and Europe - with possibly more of the same to come later this month.¹ In England we have had the hottest June ever recorded, remembering that the previous month had seen the hottest springtime (34.8°C, exceeding the previous record by over 2°C). Unfortunately things appear to be heating up at an extraordinarily rapid pace.

Therefore on June 22 the Met Office issued ‘red extreme’ heat warnings for June 24 and June 25, only the second time in history that such a rating has been issued in Britain.² The June temperature record was broken three days in a row: up to 36.1°C on June 24, 36.7°C on June 25, and 37.7°C on June 26. But forecasters say a fresh July heatwave could be brewing, with maybe more red warnings, and another “heat dome” trapping hot air over the country.³ If that turns out to be the case, this is very bad news, as at least 15 people died in water-related incidents during the May heatwave in the UK.

As for mainland Europe, the heatwave began on June 17 just days before the summer solstice.⁴ This culminated in Germany ⁠and Italy, which endured sweltering conditions on June 27 after temperatures broke records above 40°C. Even Denmark registered its highest temperature on record at 36.6°C, while in Slovakia temperatures have not dropped below 26.3°C. In France, June 23 saw a high of 44.3°C - around a thousand people died, rail travel and power generation was disrupted and outdoor events were cancelled or postponed.

By June 28, the World Health Organisation said that more than 1,300 excess deaths linked to high temperatures had been recorded across Europe over the previous week, and the World Weather Attribution service described the event as the most severe heatwave recorded over the region studied.⁵ Global warming - the human-induced climate crisis - made the June daytime heatwaves this year about 10 times more likely than they would have been two decades ago, and the night-time temperature highs 100 times more likely.⁶

Just when the heatwaves should act as a grim harbinger of things to come, unless we act urgently, Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, wants to do nothing. Like the sectional trade union bureaucrat she is, she attacked energy secretary Ed Miliband and his net-zero agenda, which she said would be a “noose around the neck” of job creation: she favours, like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, more drilling for fossil fuels in the North Sea and damn the environment - or any basic rationality, for that matter.⁷

Graham’s pro-drilling, anti-Miliband stance has caused widespread unease within the wider trade union movement - one senior source saying that her interventions are “boosting Farage and his crypto backers” and have “played right into the hands of the Labour right”. Interestingly, Graham is facing a contest for her position from Simon Dubbins - who says she has not done enough to challenge Reform UK.⁸ This is obviously correct, but communists would argue that even Miliband’s net-zero agenda - insofar as it has any reality to it at all - is pathetically inadequate and offers absolutely no solution to the climate crisis.

But tell that to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc), of which 4,000 people from more than 85 countries descended upon London’s Olympia exhibition centre last week for three days of speechifying, mutual back-scratching and an orgy of confirmation bias - advertised as an “anti-woke Davos”.⁹

According to those who were there, they were an assortment of anti-abortion activists, Christian nationalists and die-hard opponents of multiculturalism. While London sweltered, they took advantage of the air-conditioning, as they listened to speaker after speaker denouncing the woke net-zero obsession, using fans handed out in goodie bags and emblazoned with the slogan, “Free speech never felt so cool”.¹⁰

There was Nigel Farage, of course, and YouTube warrior Chris Wright - the US energy secretary who has served as the CEO of North America’s second largest fracking company - and all manner of far-right ideologues, politicians, thinkers and general weirdos - all chomping at the bit to attack Miliband’s stated goal of zero carbon emissions by 2050. And, of course, there was Kemi Badenoch - a bit like Sharon Graham, with her speech labelling Miliband as the “villain” responsible for Britain’s woes - “he has made our country poorer,” said Badenoch, to enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Irresponsible

But, as we know, all serious climate scientists have been saying for decades that, even if we arrived magically at net-zero today, not in 2050, we would still be on course to break agreed climate targets and goals - not just for the next decade or century, perhaps not only for a few thousand years, but maybe for a million years. Because of what we have done in terms of releasing CO₂ since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we will still be dealing with global warming whatever we do.

Of course, if we simply carry on as we are - meaning actually increasing CO₂ emissions - then, yes, things will get worse than they would otherwise. So redouble the fight against global warming despite the time it will take to turn the oil tanker around (to beat an old metaphor to death). But we are not talking here about Ed Miliband’s net-zero by 2050: rather, overthrowing the entire capitalist system and its production for the sake of production, and capital as self-expanding value.¹¹

When we are dealing with the wonderfully misnamed Arc, on the other hand, it should be renamed the alliance for irresponsible citizens. These people want to drill, baby, drill, and, though they might not quite say that climate change is a ‘con’ - as their hero in the White House frequently does - they have turned their opposition to net-zero by 2050 into an obvious code for climate denialism. Just as those who try to deny Israel’s actions in Gaza are, to be frank, guilty of genocide denialism.

The BBC has always been a mouthpiece of the ruling class since its very beginning, it goes without saying. But it used to be the case that, in the name of ‘balance’, which we hear about endlessly from its hacks, the BBC would air a climate expert, someone like professor Ed Hawkins or Friederike Otto, who might briefly discuss the latest weather item. Then, in the name of ‘balance’, they would wheel out some old retired Tory MP, like Lord (Nigel) Lawson - he notoriously stated on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the last 10 years had seen a temperature decrease (August 10 2017). Others would dismiss warming as the work of sunspots, or even relish the prospect of vineyards in northern England and even mining coal in the Antarctic.

Such harebrained lunacy was on full display at Olympia exhibition centre. Yet what climate scientists tell us - backed up by huge amounts of empirical data - is that vast tracts of land, particularly in the centre of Asia, Africa, North and South America, will see vegetation dieback. Many places will get so hot that we human beings cannot sweat. Maybe you can just about survive with air-conditioning blazing, but meanwhile what you will get is desertification. What you will get is plants that cannot survive because of the shift in rainfall patterns. What you will also get (and we are guaranteed this under the best-case scenarios) is one coastal city after another disappearing under the waters, as the global ice sheets and the permafrost melt.¹² Liverpool, central London, New York, Dallas, Shanghai … Jakarta is already being abandoned and Lagos, home to over 21 million people, is at risk of being inundated in the next 30 years or so.¹³

Terrifying

That is why the New Scientist was right to run the headline, “If you aren't terrified by this heatwave, you should be” - saying that the extreme heat currently being felt in Europe “isn’t the new normal”, because “much worse is to come, and we are doing far too little to adapt”.¹⁴ We find out from the Copernicus Climate Change service this week that temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high - thus on June 21 temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time of year in 2023 and 2024.¹⁵

Copernicus went on to warn that the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems”, not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

At the time when the previous ocean record for June was set, in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying” and “terrifying”, for the simple reason that they were so far outside their expectations - presaging an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods and storms. But that 2023 record has now been surpassed, and the unbearable heat that we experienced last month looks more than likely to happen again this month - or possibly worse. All this raises unavoidable fears over the speed of total climate change.

This leads NS to say that “there are reasons to think that we’re in for extremes even greater than those currently projected for a given level of warming”. One reason for this, they speculate, is that climate models so far may not be capturing how the dynamics of the jet streams change in a warmer world, and also that the regional models have not yet accounted for reductions in sunlight-blocking air pollution. Then there is the question of how bad the “knock-on effects” of this extreme weather will be, also writes NS, as these things are very difficult to project, because so many complex systems are involved - but here too there is a reasonable suspicion that we are underestimating the impacts.

Not to forget what the NS calls the “wild cards”, such as the Amazon drying up or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation shutting down. Indeed, some scientists believe that a slowdown of AMOC around 12,000 years ago triggered extreme seasonality in places like Britain, with sweltering summers, but temperatures plummeting tens of degrees below freezing in winter.¹⁶

Frankly, with this in mind the so-called anti-woke rhetoric on display at Olympia exhibition centre ought to be dismissed as the ravings of the scientifically illiterate. Of course, what is worrying, what is tragic, is that so many of the speakers are in, or near to being in, government. These people have no intention, no thought of even tempering the destructive logic of capitalism. Indeed they seem determined to remove all controls.