Season now has a health warning and people may lose associations of joy, relaxation and celebration Beware summer! The season we used to anticipate as the lightest, brightest, balmiest time of the year now comes with a health warning. For the first time in the UK, the Met Office issued an extreme heat advisory this week. The warning was very staid, very British, but a clear shift away from the ethos of Keep Calm and Carry On. The amber alert urged precautions against adverse health effects for vulnerable populations, pressure on water resources, potential power cuts and increased likelihood of transport delays. Given the temperatures were only a little over 30C for a few days, this might seem risible to people living in far hotter parts of the world, but it is part of a growing global conversation that is fundamentally challenging how we think about summer in a climate-disrupted world. In the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, where most of the human population lives, the months of June, July and August have until recently been seen a season of joy, relaxation and celebration. It is when people take their longest holiday of the year, when most weddings are arranged, when Olympics and World Cups are staged. Newspapers have long filled their midsummer front pages with seasonal images of children slurping ice-creams, holidaymakers at the beach and women in bikinis. There are fewer cases of depression linked to seasonally adjusted disorder. Radio DJs fill the airwaves with upbeat seasonal staples such as Summer Breeze, Sunny Afternoon and Walking on Sunshine. But a jarring note has been struck in recent weeks by a wave of violent extreme weather that has smashed heat and rain records, killed hundreds and raised fears that summer may never seem the same again. Suddenly the full fury of the climate crisis appears almost everywhere at once. Three weeks ago, it was the deadly heatwave in the north-west Americas that smashed... |