All week the news has been DOOMSAYING that we’re living through “record‑breaking weather the likes of which we have never seen before.” Yet this morning a memory popped up on Facebook from eight years ago, Wales sitting at 39°C, and me slowly roasting like a Welsh pasty. This week I only spotted 38°C here. Not exactly the apocalypse they’re selling.
But of course the news must sell the fear… sorry, the news. They need those clicks, those views, those dramatic graphics with flaming thermometers. It’s the same routine every winter: dire warnings of “the worst snowstorms since the Ice Age,” and every summer: “temperatures so high the roads will melt and civilisation may collapse by teatime.”
All you have to do is ignore actual history. Take the legendary two‑week heatwave of 1976, the one Wales still talks about because, for once, we actually got a summer, Wet, Wet Wales even had a hosepipe ban! Scotland had its longest heatwave ever recorded. Spare a thought for the fair‑skinned (aka ginger) folk of the Highlands; they must have felt like they were being slow‑roasted by the gods.
Then there was the 10‑day scorcher in 2003, and plenty of others the Met Office happily lists as UK heatwaves at these very temperatures. We’ve been here before. Repeatedly.
I’m convinced human memory has been shortened by decades of bite‑sized entertainment, starting with MTV and ending with TikTok. Attention spans have been trimmed down like bonsai trees. So when someone on the news solemnly declares, “This is the hottest it has been since records began,” the records they’re referring to are their own social media wall.
Once a new clip pushes the old one off the screen, it’s no longer “recorded.” History becomes whatever fits in a scrolling feed.