The future may well have arrived earlier than many expected if the current record climate extremes are anything to go by. 2018 has been a really remarkable year worldwide.

Kerala, a state about four times the size of Yorkshire in the south west of India, has over 30 million people. It’s well known for its tourist beaches but now also for the unprecedented intensity of the monsoon rains, up to three times more than normal, resulting in many hundreds of deaths, and damage running into the billions.

They could do with some of this rain in California where the wild fire season has been the most exceptional ever experienced. The record drought of the last few years meant that last December there were over 130 million dead trees waiting to burn, and they did just that this summer. Indeed northern California was designated a National Disaster area with the largest ever recorded wild fire plus 5,000 smaller ones.

The whole of the Australian state of New South Wales, more than three times the area of the UK, is in complete drought, while Cape Town is suffering similarly, and parts of East Africa are enduring the worst drought ever recorded. An Algerian town has just recorded an African record with its 51 degrees Celsius.

Europe hasn’t missed out, as we all know from our warm, dry summer, and records have been set in Norway, Sweden and Finland with up to 32 C within the Arctic Circle. Another dozen or so countries in Europe, and some in South America, have all set new figures.

While the UK figures for the whole country equalled those of 1976, 2003 and 2006, the 2018 figure for England alone set a new average summer temperature record of 15.8C.

It’s clear that there’s now far more energy in the climate system and this isn’t helped by all the extra CO2 produced by the cost, in billions, of fire fighting, the planes dropping water, cooling air conditioning, and rebuilding thousands of destroyed houses, over 12,000 in California alone.

So, less CO2, please.