Baby, it's hot outside: A fearmonger's guide to dressing for the apocalypse

It is the year 2074 and we are at the end of another glorious half-century of climate extremes that have kept us on our toes; nimble and spry and ready for the next challenge. Those of us who have survived at least.

As I was digging the weekend's accumulated ash and filth from around the front door of my burrow this morning I thought about a time, 50 years ago, when we didn't live underground and were mildly surprised by the warming weather.

It was a beautiful time when we still used that antiquated term "drought" as though the rain would at some point return to a stable and reliable pattern in the coming years.

We were aware of climate change, of course, and had been for half a century, but that was a thing that far off future generations would have to prepare for, not us. We were simply too comfortable to make any substantial changes to our lives.

And why would we? We had bigger things to worry about, like whether drag queens should have been allowed to read books to children and whether the tax cuts we were giving billionaires were big enough.

Perhaps that is too cynical; people were struggling to afford to feed and house their families and had just lived through, what was then, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and were reasonably inward looking in their concerns.

And the politicians of the day, forever concerned only about their own electability and being returned to government at the next election focused only on short term problems and ideological solutions and failed to capture the public's imagination with big ideas about bigger problems.

And maybe that is reasonable; people will only vote for you if you show you are interested in the problems they have in their daily lives, and it is damn hard to enact ambitious policies if you are not in government.

But if you had told me then that the climate had already irrevocably changed and that the weird and wacky weather events we had been experiencing in recent months and years were symptoms of that change I simply would have sighed, and encouraged you to upgrade your puffer jacket to something Kevlar-lined, light and breathable.