Jill Hembury broke the egg into a saucepan. She wanted to fry it - but not on a stove. Instead, she carried the pan out of her front door in Bristol to her 32-year-old Honda Civic and left it on the dashboard along with a thermometer - which reached 45C. "The egg only took 20 minutes to cook," she says. "It was hilarious!"

She added that she would have cooked the egg on the bonnet - "But there's no way it would have lasted with all the seagulls we have around. I'm going to try toasting my bread on the aerial and hope the gulls don't get it before I do."

That was last July. Whether car barbecues become a feature of this summer remains to be seen - but many people fear that the heat is getting beyond a joke.

On Monday, after temperatures reached 30C, a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire was brought into action. According to the company which operates the National GridIn the UK, the network of power stations, power lines and electricity infrastructure that brings electricity to buildings. , it was needed to meet the extra demand for air conditioning.

Around 20% of all the electricity used in buildings around the world goes into air conditioning. A GreenpeaceAn international campaigning organisation based in Amsterdam. Its aim is to  "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity". campaigner, Ami McCarthy, pointed out the irony:

"The National Grid is turning to one of the most polluting forms of power generation to deal with a summer heatwave that we know has been made worse because of climate change."

Ironically, too, the high temperatures have also reduced the energy generated by solar panels. These are designed to work best at 25C, and their efficiency falls by 0.5% for every degree higher than that.¹

According to a Met Office expert, Mark Bevan,² the chance of the UK experiencing a hot summer are 45%, which is 2.3 times the normal figure. Whether temperatures will reach 40C as they did in summer 2022 is unclear:

"There's no strong indications for it. On the other hand, we saw it last year, so it's obviously inherentlyEssentially or unfailingly. It comes from the Latin word haerere, meaning to stick. possible."

With the heat has come the danger of wildfires. Last month there was a huge one on the Corrimony nature reserve near Loch NessA long and narrow lake in Scotland. It is famous for the Loch Ness Monster, a huge creature that some believe lives in the lake. .

In Surrey alone there have been over 80 so far this year. "We are heading towards a northern Mediterranean climate in the South East of England within the next decade and fires will be business as usual day in, day out," says Matt Oakley, an investigator for the county fire service.

"Our climate is changing, it's changing beyond recognition. What used to be a nine-to-twelve-year cycle is now every year."

A new study by Bath University indicates that he is right. It predicts that top temperatures of 41C and weekly averages of 28C will be common for much of southern England by 2100. Fifty years ago those figures were 31C and 20C.

If this is correct, it will mean big changes to the way people in Britain live. According to Mark Bevan, "The 2022 heatwave disrupted transport, the emergency services, power supplies and people's health - and we now realise these are impacts that will have to be dealt with regularly in coming years."

Yes: The planet is getting hotter and we are far from cutting carbon emissions enough to keep the process at a manageable level. Britain will feel the consequences like everywhere else.

No: Heat waves are the product of weather patterns which vary from year to year. If the wind reaching Britain comes mainly from the north, or the sea's temperature is cold, it will cool the country down.

Or... Since a wave is something that goes up and down, there can be no such thing as a permanent heatwave. Instead, Britain might simply have to endure a permanent state of heat.