Okay, let's talk global warming.  No, I'm not talking about any weedy three degrees Celsius rise per century stuff.  I'm talking London has the mean temperature of a pottery kiln over the course of a few weeks.

How does this happen?  Any of a number of things, really.  A new star appears in the sky like a cosmic heat lamp, a planet plunges into the Sun and amps up the output or, and this was a favourite in the '50s, atmospheric nuclear tests were to blame.  Though, oddly, after the West stopped above ground tests in the '60s, no one seemed too worried when the Red Chinese kept popping them off in the Gobi like it was Chinese New Year.

But the most graphic prediction came from the Ban the Bomb parable The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), in which the United States and the Soviet Union accidentally detonate a pair of hydrogen bombs at opposite ends of the globe and send the Earth spiralling towards the Sun.  At first seeming like an unusually warm summer with the odd freakish fog and wind storm, the weather soon settles down to a relentless baking tin sort of heat that one only experiences these days while waiting for someone in a shopping centre car park in July.  Water is rationed, typhoid breaks out, amusement park rides close, and beatniks roam the streets at night playing trumpets.  Eventually it gets so bad that the film goes all sepia and the screenwriter collapses from heat prostration.

Tales of Future Past | Ephemeral Isle | Freelance Writing | Radio Plays | Shop