August 2026 was the joint hottest month ever recorded.
Global temperatures were 1.65°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Sea surface temperatures also reached a joint record high. This is not some distant warning about what might happen to our grandchildren.
It is happening now.
Across Europe, extreme heat brought drought to the UK, France, Hungary, Serbia and Romania. Rivers including the Rhine and Danube fell to exceptionally low levels.
Here in Britain, this summer was the hottest on record. And the consequences are already everywhere.
During an eight-day heatwave in June, at least 760,000 children in England and Wales missed school, losing more than 15 million hours of teaching. More than 1,700 schools closed completely or finished early. Some classrooms exceeded 40°C. Children and teachers suffered headaches, nausea and heat stress. Staff and pupils reportedly fainted. Hospitals cancelled operations. Workplaces shortened their hours. Nearly 2,900 excess deaths were recorded during the May and June heatwaves. Still think climate change is tomorrow’s problem?
Britain Is Drying Out
The ground beneath us is changing too.
Much of England and Wales is suffering from significant water-storage deficits. In the driest parts of southern England, unusually high rainfall would be needed just to make up the shortfall, and those deficits are expected to persist for months. There is even a name for the point where soil becomes so dry that plants can no longer access the remaining water: the permanent wilting point. That should probably concern us in a country where we quite enjoy eating. Farmers are already expecting poor harvests of broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower after the drought. The Royal Horticultural Society now advises gardeners to reconsider growing cauliflower because England’s climate has changed so much that the crop is becoming increasingly unreliable.
Plants traditionally associated with British gardens are struggling while warmer-climate crops such as okra, chillies and aubergines are becoming easier to grow. Climate change is literally altering what grows in Britain.
This Is Also A Food Security Crisis
Behind the immediate headlines sits something even more disturbing.
A UK intelligence assessment reportedly warned that collapsing ecosystems overseas could bring severe food shortages, rising prices, mass migration, political instability and potentially armed conflict. That is climate change translated into national security.
Food. Water. Housing. Education. Health. Migration. War. There is no neat little box labelled “environment” where we can contain this. And yet when politicians discuss the causes of climate change, one sector remains extraordinarily easy to tiptoe around. Animal agriculture.
We May Have Been Underestimating It
A 2025 paper in Environmental Research Letters argues that conventional greenhouse-gas accounting substantially understates the contribution of agriculture because of how land-use emissions, historical deforestation and different greenhouse gases are counted.
Using an alternative accounting method, the study estimated that agriculture was responsible for 60% of the effective radiative forcing associated with present-day warming since 1750. The author acknowledges substantial uncertainty around some parts of the calculation, but agriculture remained the leading sector when the assumptions were tested.
More importantly, the analysis estimated that agriculture caused about 0.74°C of net global warming between 1750 and 2020. Of that, 86% was attributed to animal agriculture. Not agriculture generally. The overwhelming majority of the warming attributed to agriculture in this analysis came from animal agriculture. The study points to two enormous problems: methane and land.
Animal agriculture is identified as the largest agricultural source of methane, while the land devoted to it represents an enormous lost opportunity to restore forests and draw carbon back out of the atmosphere. The paper estimates that land currently used for animal agriculture has the potential to store about 540 gigatonnes of CO₂ if restored. It also describes agriculture as a major disruptor of five planetary boundaries: climate change, freshwater change, land-system change, biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows.
We Cannot Keep Treating This As Optional
None of this means fossil fuels suddenly stop mattering. The study itself is explicit that quitting fossil fuels remains urgent. But “stop burning fossil fuels” cannot become an excuse to ignore everything else.
What exactly is the plan here?
Watch temperatures smash records. Watch schools close. Watch people die in heatwaves. Watch soils dry out. Watch harvests fail. Watch ecosystems collapse. Then continue using vast areas of land to breed and feed animals while pretending food choices are somehow outside climate policy?
We do not have that luxury.
The climate crisis is already changing Britain. Addressing fossil fuels is essential. Addressing data centres is essential. Addressing animal agriculture is essential too. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the hotter the consequences become.
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