Apart from those perhaps working near-constantly in fridges, most UK-based human lifeforms experienced an uptick in temps this week.

Hottest May day ever, it has been declared – but wait! Wait say the ‘Wait!’ sayers: wasn’t it awfully, awfully hot a very, very long time ago, when dinosaurs stalked the earth and we didn’t have to put up with all this woke climate crisis nonsense? How can ‘they’ claim that it’s the hottest May day ever when etc etc?

Well, what to say? What can the average Telegraph reader or Reform/MAGA supporter be expected to absorb? This week, doom fans, I’m going to try and explain how this works.

Throughout its long life, the earth has experienced enormous variations in its climate: sometimes it’s been very, very warm; sometimes it’s been very, very cold. How do we know this? Because of the scientific method, applied by experts in various fields who have been able to discern conditions in the distant past. (Woke scientists and their crazy, infuriating ideas do have a use, but only when they’re talking about the distant past, it seems.)

Homo sapiens emerged roughly 300,000 years ago. For a long time after that, our ancestors kind of drifted about, the odd cave painting here, harnessing fire there, but there was very little in the way of decent restaurants.

About 11,000 years ago, the last ice age ended, and the current Holocene era began. About 2,000 years after that, agriculture emerged, and our nomadic forefathers found they could get by without always having to be on the move. This breakthrough apparently opened the door that led to the development of things such as cities, societies, laws, nasal hair trimmers and short tennis. And here we all are today – haven’t we done well?

During this period of rapid development, the climate has been temperate: on the whole, neither too hot nor too cold. That’s 11,000 years; 11,000 years of a climate temperate enough to sustain humans to the point we’ve had the leisure time to work out how to make words go on a screen and then send those words to the little screen you carry in your pocket and which you’re listlessly glancing at now while you wait for your taxi.

How many more years of this temperate usefulness can the human race reasonably hope to experience? 30,000 years? 100,000 years? 150,000 years? We can’t say: one day the ice is almost certainly coming back. We can’t say exactly when.

And this is the very important bit: we’ve been writing things down for about 3,000 years. That’s a long time: a lot of human lives, a lot of experiences, a lot of triumphs, many failures, a vast amount of art, and so on. Say the planet gave us another 15,000 years of this temperate perfection. That’s a very, very long time, in human terms. Of course, the next ice age could begin at 9pm tonight; that seems very unlikely, however.

While we remain very largely at the whim of planetary and cosmic caprices that we don’t fully understand, we do know that our species has been effectively gifted a possibly rare climatic window that has allowed us to flourish. And we might get another 30,000 years!

However, our woke scientists have also worked out – and they worked this out a long time ago – that our actions, actions that culminate in the release of certain elements and compounds into the atmosphere, will lead to the climate changing rapidly, unpredictably and dangerously, independently of any fluctuations in such fundamentals as tectonic plates, solar movements or magnetic fields. This is something we can predict, and we have proved we can predict. No, don’t look away sneering. We can predict.

And stop. It’s also something we can stop, by choosing to behave differently. And behave differently we must. There is no way around it.

But, and this is really rather the nub of the matter: who cares about what humans are facing in, I don’t know, 6,000 years? Because this is all this argument is really about – the climatic will change, it always has, there’s nothing to be done, enjoy yourself, shut up! The argument, as far it’s actually an argument and not a kind of eructation, is that the future  (future people, future animals, future everything) doesn’t matter.

It’d probably make the conversation simpler if people just admitted that. Have a good weekend!