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EVEN by Australian standards, last summer was a scorcher. January 2017 was the hottest ever recorded in Sydney and Brisbane, and great swathes of the south-east endured temperatures that often exceeded 40°C for weeks on end. In South Australia, soaring electricity demand caused an outage that left 90,000 homes sweltering through a blackout with no air conditioning. Across New South Wales, 87 bush fires blazed. It was so hot that dairy cows dropped dead in the fields.

This kind of heatwave isn’t a blip. that saw Sydney’s temperature climb to over 47°C earlier this month – the highest recorded in the city for 79 years  – and could see both it and Melbourne experiencing mega‑heatwaves with highs of 50°C by 2040. “Going out to 40 or 50 years, basically the summer we just had will be normal,” says Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick at the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. “It hasn’t really sunken in yet in Australia.”

Australians are not alone: most of us fail to take the “warming” in global warming seriously. If you live somewhere temperate, you might even welcome a rise of a few degrees as offering more opportunity for picnics, barbecues and relaxed afternoons in pub gardens. That is unwise. Even now, heatwaves are deadly, and as global warming increases . Human physiology is not designed to cope with the temperatures predicted for…