Portugal has shattered its May temperature record, with thermometers hitting 36.9°C in Mora, as a heatwave grips southern Europe. The UK, predictably, is on alert. It is a familiar ritual: the headlines scream, the politicians wring their hands, and the public—dazed and air-conditioned—muddle through. Yet what strikes me is not the heat itself, but the collective failure to grasp its historical context. We are not witnessing a unique meteorological anomaly. We are watching the return of something ancient, a climate rhythm that our ancestors knew intimately before we forgot it in the glow of industrial comfort.
Consider the little ice age of the 17th century, when the Thames froze solid enough for frost fairs. Or the medieval warm period, when Vikings farmed Greenland. The climate has always shifted; the difference is that we have built our civilisation on the assumption of stability. Now, as Portuguese records fall and British lawns turn brown, we react with shock as though the planet had broken some implicit contract. It has not. The contract was always provisional.
What vexes me more than the heat is the intellectual decadence of our response. We talk of “carbon footprints” and “net zero targets” as though these were talismans against the sun’s fury. But history teaches that civilisations do not collapse because of rising temperatures alone. They collapse because they become brittle, inflexible, unable to adapt. Late Rome did not fall to barbarians; it fell to its own inability to manage the ecological and economic stresses that preceded them. Our own habits—of concrete, of cheap energy, of denial—make Portugal’s record not a warning but a mirror.
The UK’s alert is a bureaucratic reflex, a test of our disaster management apparatus. But what would it mean to take this heat seriously? Not to obsess over temperature targets but to rethink the geography of our cities: more shade, more water, more stone. The Portuguese, with their centuries of Mediterranean experience, know this. Their record hot day is not a surprise to them; it is a grim milestone. Yet we Britons, with our temperate delusions, still think the rain will return in July.
Perhaps it will. But the pattern is clear: these records are not anomalies anymore. They are the new normal, or rather, the old normal reasserting itself. The question is whether we have the wisdom to learn from history, or whether we will continue to stage moral panics about carbon while designing cities that cook their inhabitants. Portugal’s record is a fact. Our response will be a verdict.
