Think of the parable of a frog in boiling water. That’s us dithering as the ‘unprecedented‘ weather becomes more extreme | Helen Pilcher

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The complacency is staggering: just another hot summer, a flooded street, a crop failure. We are accepting this extraordinary deterioration as normalRecently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”. I felt myself bristle. Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale. Now i