TO BE HONEST, we’re all shocked. Out here in the desert, we just keep walking around our air-conditioned homes, shaking our heads and saying to ourselves, well, it just can’t be so.

Yes, summer is here, and against all the odds — it’s hot. No one is more surprised than our local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times. Every day it fills us in with new facts about the freak conditions: “Summer’s Heat Fills the Calendar With Fry Days” it gasped on Saturday. The next morning, on the front page, it added: “110, 122 (!) and More Dog Days to Come”.

All of which goes to show: the British are not alone in obsessing over the weather. Oh, how Californians chuckle when we natives of the windy, drizzly British Isles complain about the windy, drizzly weather. And yet here are the pioneers of the Wild West, living in an outpost of the Mojave Desert — a mere few hundred miles from a place called Death Valley — and they have worked themselves with into a frenzy of dread over a prolonged bout of late July sunshine.

In case you think I’m immune to this madness, I’m not: the heat is killing me.

It should come as no surprise then, that news of triple-digit temperatures has almost entirely eclipsed news of the coming Armageddon in Lebanon, with editors across the state searching daily for new weather angles. So far, I have read reports on the difficulty of making meringue in hot weather, the phenomenon of trees being used as shade, the exact number of megawatts consumed during late afternoon (5,171), and the oddity of California surfers not wearing wetsuits. Not to mention the revelation that Long Beach residents are buying portable fans from hardware stores.

To be fair, hot weather in California is not the same as it is elsewhere, for one terrifying reason: firestorms.

And if anything qualifies as local news, it is a 200ft wall of flame heading towards your house. Over the weekend, a blaze near Palm Springs burned through 62,000 acres of desert, killing one person and destroying $8.7 million of property, including 50 homes, 8 mobile homes, 200 vehicles and 171 other structures. It was enough to bring out Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, who made an official visit to the front lines on Saturday.

But is one fire cause for alarm? Today’s forecast is for a high of 89F — hot, yes, but way off the record 104F recorded back when Ronald Reagan was Governor.

Part of me wonders whether all the fuss is a result of Angelenos believing their own climate propaganda. In the film LA Story, Steve Martin plays a weatherman who is anguished by the monotony of reporting a temperature of 72F every day, no matter what. Indeed, it was the promise of this temperate weather that brought many settlers out to the West Coast in the first place — before they found out about the monsoons, the earthquakes, the wildfires and the mudslides (a mere 15 minutes of rain after a wildfire can trigger a deluge of mud).

And yet in the four years I’ve been here, the Los Angeles weather has never been anything but entirely unpredictable.

On the August day I arrived, I remember shivering from the cold. Then, in the winter of 2003, there was an inexplicable month of 90F heat. That was followed by the rain of late 2004 — which almost washed my house off the side of the Santa Monica Mountains — and then the bizarre English-style drizzle that blighted most of this spring.

Now, according to meteorologists, California has skipped July and August weather entirely and jumped straight to late summer, when the whole place typically catches fire.

The subtext of the weather obsession, of course, is fear over climate change. Yet no one — in particular the media — seems to want to mention this persistent tug on the Angeleno conscience, perhaps because it seems, well, a little too Al Gore.

So instead we huddle inside our air-conditioned homes, ignoring advice to keep the thermostat at 78F, or to hang our clothes outside instead of using the tumble drier.

And yet, regardless of what’s causing the heatwave, it would be nice to do something about it. Governor Schwarzenegger’s promise of affordable solar panels comes to mind. At least Angelenos could then take some comfort in the sun — some pride, even. Which would make a lot more sense than complaining.

Read more LA Notebooks here

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money