It has been incredibly hot recently. I think we've been through the fifth official heatwave of the summer. Apparently areas of Wales are still literally on fire. It has felt like being at the hot end of a glass factory - not that many people know what that's like or even that such places exist. This has been beyond any summer that I remember from the past.

I was listening to a report on the news about the persistent high temperature and high humidity - jungle conditions - and they were saying that summers are going to be like this, or worse, in future and that we just need to adapt to that and "farm differently". That is, growing more drought resistant crops and bioengineering for arid conditions. And yes, that can be done.

But "farming differently" will only go so far. There is a physical limit of temperature beyond which life cannot sustain, and no amount of selective breeding or direct germline modification will get you out of the problem. Life exists within physical boundary conditions which no amount of ingenuity will be able to overcome. Yes, there are bacteria living on hydrothermal vents at close to boiling point, but growing crops on land is a whole different thing with much narrower tollerances.

And this is where the news coverage falls down. Adapting to higher temperatures wont work, not just in the long term but also in the medium term. But in the mainstream there is no sense of urgency or that anything really needs to be done other than a few changes to farming. According to this intellectually lazy narrative we can just carry on polluting the atmosphere while adapting to the consequences indefinitely.