The hot temperatures on May 1st across most of England and Wales were at least three times as likely due to climate change - and you can see that on the map below from Climate Central's Climate Shift Index.

This useful tool is not a straight temperature map - it shows how statistically unlikely temperatures would be if we hadn't heated up our atmosphere, land and oceans with fossil fuels.

You can see that there are extremely abnomally high temperatures in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and western India, South East Asia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil. 

And then you might wonder, "Why haven't I seen anything about these heatwaves on the news?" The truth is that record-breaking temperatures elsewhere in the world rarely get a mention in UK media, unless they are in southern Europe where many of us take holidays.

These records are broken so frequently that, in a way, abnormal heat has become the 'new normal'. However, this phrase is misleading if it is taken to imply that things will stay the same - unless we stop burning fossil fuels, the weather will continue becoming more extreme.

One person who has dedicated himself to publicising extreme temperatures is Maximiliano Herrera who publishes updates on Bluesky and X/Twitter. For example here he lists countries in south west Asia that broke April temperature records. Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan all set April records for maximum daily temperature or minimum overnight temperature, or both.

In UAE, temperatures have been hotter than the July average. What does that mean for outdoor workers? There is so little coverage of heatwaves, unless they cause wildfires to break out, as happened most recently in Israel. In the Philippines, the school calendar has been changed to protect children from extreme heat.

Collectively, we need to share all the information we can get about the impacts of climate breakdown, both here in the UK, where the Climate Change Committee recently warned that we can expect heatwaves to kill over 10,000 a year by 2050, and around the world, where the impacts are much more deadly.

And we must put the heat on governments and fossil fuel companies who are driving climate breakdown and extreme temperatures.