Is there anything we could have done to avoid the hottest day on record? “Early, concerted efforts to prevent climate change worsening would have made the heatwave less likely. But there’s no point dwelling on what we didn’t do – we must use this as encouragement to act today,” Dr Gilbert continues. “The science shows we must increase the ambition of climate action to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.”

Indeed, a lack of political will to change our reliance on fossil fuels is exacerbating the situation, Alanna Byrne from Extinction Rebellion tells Stylist. She says governments are “well aware of the deadly seriousness of the climate crisis” but are continuing to pursue “rampant economic growth that is driving climate and ecological destruction, rather than daring to imagine a new way of living to protect life, and then having the courage to act on it”.

Governments are influenced by fossil fuel lobbyists and a profit-driven mainstream media that “cares more about profit margins than telling people the full truth of what we face, meaning people don’t know the true risk of inaction, the real cause of how we got here or what we need to do about it”, adds Byrne.

Despite all this, governments and companies with the power to effect change aren’t doing anywhere near enough. The UK government continues to approve new oil fields in the North Sea, flying in the face of climate experts’ warnings, and the climate emergency is the bottom priority for Conservative members in the party’s leadership contest.

“The science is clear that policy ambition needs to increase: this is true at the national and international level,” Dr Gilbert says. “There is no time to lose; climate change has to be at the forefront of the political agenda.”

Thankfully, protests by groups like Extinction Rebellion – who this week smashed windows at News UK headquarters over its heatwave coverage – have done a huge amount to raise public awareness of the gravity of the situation. Byrne highlights Extinction Rebellion’s actions in 2019, which pushed the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency, and the millions of school strikers around the world as having kept the climate at the top of the media agenda.

However, she cautions: “It’s important we accept that very little has really changed in the last few years and that it’s going to take a mass movement of millions of people standing together across differences to turn this ship around.”

These are the stages of climate denial that led to the UK’s hottest day on record