Andy Richardson: Climate's changing, weather we like it or not

As we head deeper into autumn and a time when leaves ought to have fallen from the trees, frosts ought to have settled on the ground and central heating systems ought to have been cranked up; we're enjoying a summer that's been more Indian than Sachin Tendulkar.

We ought to be eating butternut squash soup and looking forward to apple and blackberry crumble. Instead we're wondering whether to fire up the weekend barbecue or make-do with a salad.

We ought to be cosying up in Blacks Fleeces and looking forward to weekends wrapped in Helly Hansen. Instead we're stripping down to our shorts and rushing out to stock up on T-shirts.

We ought to be planning long weekends to Barcelona, Madrid, Athens or Rome so that we can catch the last of the 2016 rays. Instead we're thinking of visiting Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo or Reykjavik so that we can cool down like dogs that have been left to overheat in cars.

The earth's getting warmer. Global sea levels rose by 17 centimetres in the last century, nearly double that of the previous century. The 20 warmest years in the history of the planet have taken place since 1981, with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.

The ice sheets have shrunk dramatically during the present millennium. In a recorded three-year period, Antarctica lost about 36 cubic miles of ice while Greenland lost up to 60 cubic miles.

Intense weather events are on the rise, the oceans are acidifying, snow cover is decreasing and glaciers in the Alps, Himalays, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa are all in retreat.

Such scientific consensuses are, however, ignored and ridiculed by sceptics who refuse to believe what Al Gore famously described as An Inconvenient Truth.

One such disbeliever, Aussie politician Malcolm Roberts, clashed earlier this summer with British scientist Professor Brian Cox on a salacious Antipodean talkshow. The One Nation advocate asked for empirical data and Professor Cox duly obliged, producing more graphs than a National Geographic artist.

He talked patiently and intelligently about the process of climate change to senator-elect Roberts – then learned a very simple truth: you can't reason with a closed mind. Malcolm Roberts eschewed the facts and the data, which Professor Cox had graciously printed out for him, and declared: "It's a conspiracy." Try telling that to a polar bear: or a family wading through flood waters in north east Patna after they've endured a truly Indian Summer.

Economists tell us that minimal fixes will see off global warming.

Environmentalists warn that the apocalypse is just around the corner. And senator-elect Roberts just throws another steak on the BBQ and wonders what all the fuss is about.

Global warming is arguably the biggest story facing the world. The situation in North Korea, the desperately sad civil war in Syria and the migration of millions of refugees across Europe have the potential to be dwarfed as we burn centuries of flaming carbon.

And yet it's often unreported by the mainstream media because climate change ain't sexy. Straightforward, one-off events grab almost all of the airtime – Brexit, Boris and Bonkers Seagulls who attack kids at the Beach – those make the headlines. Long-term social trends do not. Even now, Sheila, from Bilston, is ruminating thus: 'C'mon dude, get back with the surreal stuff. We like it when you tell us jokes about accents, running and chefs. Don't like go all, uh, serious on us.'

The indisputable fact is this: the world is getting hotter. Pretty soon, Black Country canals will get so warm that they'll be filled with bottlenose dolphins; in Staffordshire, the fields will heat up to such a degree that they'll be planted with groves of olives and in Shropshire, the Long Mynd will be filled with The Sound of Music as the von Trapp family leave their beloved Austria for cooler Northern European climes because it's too blinking hot.

Academics have explored why we have so little interest in a subject that will be devastating for future generations. Their results were fascinating. Initially, we view climate change as an alarmed discovery. Euphoric enthusiasm follows, then we realise the cost of tackling it and after that there's a gradual decline of interest. The only trouble is, politicians equate low media coverage of subjects with a lack of voter interest, so low levels of climate change coverage have consequences in society.

As we head into autumn, cricket ought to have ceased, puffa jackets ought to be out and fires ought to have been lit to keep our homes warm. Instead, we're huffing and puffing through clammy days that have all the hallmarks of July.

The worrying thing is that Indian Summers aren't going to be a one-off. They're going to become the norm.