40.3c In London
It sounds like it was worse than just bad.
The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.
For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands.
It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019.
A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.
The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019.
The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby.
And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So.
Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death
Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head.
Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.
Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment.
Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression.
Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.
I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground.
Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing.
Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.
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