“Climate change is a greater threat to the UK than EU directives, terrorism or a foreign power invading,” wrote climate alarmist Simon Lewis in Friday’s issue of the Guardian newspaper.

“This coming new reality is not high on the political agenda,” Lewis lamented, while “the scope of our political discussion on future threats is limited to Brexit and spending on defence.”

This must change immediately, Lewis warns, because global warming “is directly related to the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide,” and stopping the warming “requires moving to zero emissions of carbon dioxide.”

Of course, Lewis’s modest proposal of moving to zero emissions of carbon dioxide would require everyone on the planet to stop breathing, which may very well be exactly what he intends. It would also kill off all the plant life on earth since carbon dioxide is plant food.

Simon Lewis is “professor of global change science” at University College London and the University of Leeds and apparently feels the need to justify his made-up position by getting people worked up into a froth over the apocalyptic evil that is “climate change.”

Every year around this time as people begin to feel the summer heat, climate alarmists crawl out of their air-conditioned caves to issue dire doomsday warnings prophesying the end of civilization as we know it. They are aware that people are especially susceptible to the suggestion that the earth is overheating when they step out the door to kiln-like temperatures. Such predictions tend to fall a little flat in winter when people would give anything for a little global warming.

Last summer, for instance, CNN declared that “deadly heat waves are going to be a much bigger problem in the coming decades, becoming more frequent and occurring over a much greater portion of the planet.”

“Extreme heat waves,” CNN continued, “are frequently cited as one of the most direct effects of man-made climate change.”

The summer before that, in 2016, the Telegraph took advantage of a particularly hot spell to issue a similar augury.

“Heatwaves fierce enough to kill thousands will become the norm in the UK within 30 years due to climate change,” the Telegraph reported. “Repeats of the extreme heat seen in 2003 that killed more than 2,000 people are likely to become routine by the 2040s, leaving the ageing population at particular risk.”

And now, in the summer of 2018, we have Mr. Lewis to continue stoking the fears of climate cataclysm.

“Much of the world is in the grip of a heatwave,” Lewis states, and “Britain is so hot and dry that we have Indonesia-style peat fires raging across our moorlands.” Moreover, these sweltering temperatures are not just a freak event but part of an “ominous trend we need to prepare for,” he explained.

Whereas a hundred years ago, hot summers were just hot summers, now they are an omen of something huge and scary and out of control (and man-made).

It is helpful to remember that the hottest temperature ever measured on the planet was 134 degrees Fahrenheit, in Death Valley National Park. This record was set on July 10, 1913—more than 100 years ago—and had nothing to do with man-made global warming.

Then there was the deadly 1936 heat wave that killed about 5,000 people in the midwestern United States and elsewhere in the nation. In Springfield, Illinois, temperatures reached triple digits on 29 days that year, including 12 consecutive days from July 4 through 14. This was before the days of air conditioning.

When it’s hot, it’s hot, and precautions must be taken. Scaring people into thinking the sky is falling and the world is ending does nothing to help the situation.

Neither does holding your breath.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome