Last week in London as part of Climate Action Week, an event entitled Extreme Heat: Improving Governance and Strengthening Action Around the World, was due to be held at the London School of Economics. The discussion was to take place in a 100-year-old faculty building reliant on natural ventilation rather than air conditioning. The event had to be cancelled because of what the organisers deemed a risk to public safety from extreme heat.

A panel discussion on extreme heat and climate action having to be cancelled because of extreme heat: it’s hard to imagine a more lurid symptom of an unfolding climate disaster. But there is a second-order irony here, too, which is that the event’s cancellation, and the media coverage it received, has probably done more to communicate the urgent need for heat adaptation strategies than a public discussion on the topic could ever have done. The LSE building intended to host the event was constructed with a view to withstanding not the sort of swelteringly hot summers that are now becoming the norm, but rather cold winter temperatures. Our societies are not built, either figuratively or literally, for the world we now inhabit.

[ One in 10 Irish homes is at risk of overheating. Supermarket fans won’t cut itOpens in new window ]

As Fintan O’Toole pointed out in these pages earlier this week, we are already beginning to see what he called “grim intimations of societal breakdown” across Europe as a result of extreme heat: in the UK, hospital MRI scanners and radiotherapy machines failing to function, and, in France – a country whose electricity is mostly nuclear-generated – nuclear power reactors taken offline because the........

© The Irish Times