RAGING HEAT, roads melting, rails buckling, hosepipe bans, record-breaking temperatures — it is amazing how similar this summer is to the great hot summer of 1976. This week temperature records tumbled, and the Sahara-like conditions are set to become even stickier for the next few days at least.

Thirty years ago there was an even more phenomenal heatwave, when Britain recorded 32C (90F) for 15 successive days, from June 23 to July 7. Nothing like it had happened before or since. Britain looked like a Mediterranean country — lawns turned brown, crops shrivelled and palls of smoke from wildfires hung over the countryside. Elm trees became so stressed from drought that they succumbed to Dutch elm disease, their skeletons dotted across the landscape like gallows.

The seemingly endless clear blue skies and scorching sun went on for nine weeks, from June 22 until August 26. East Anglia turned into a dust bowl, as stiff winds blew up clouds of powdery topsoil, and farmers warned of disastrous harvests. Thousands of householders noticed horrendous cracks appearing in walls as clay ground dried out under houses. A Drought Act was passed and standpipes were enforced in Devon and South Wales. And when a malaria mosquito was discovered at Gatwick there was national panic that the country was turning into a malarial zone.

But it was not just the relentless heat that strikes a chord with our current bout of Saharan weather. The summer of 1976 came after a year of abnormally low rainfall, when underground water supplies plunged to new depths, and rivers and reservoirs dried up. The cries went up: why couldn’t water be piped down from the wet regions of the North, why were there not enough reservoirs, why were waterpipes leaking so much?

But perhaps the lasting legacy of 1976 was that it was the first time that people began to take climate change seriously. Until then scientists had been making dire noises about something going terribly wrong with the weather, but it seemed so . . . well, academic. After all, what was there really to worry about when the 1970s had been mostly the usual mix of cold winters and disappointing summers? So a sensationally hot and dry summer in 1975 came as a rude shock. It could have been written off as a one-off freak, but two successive summers of blistering heat stretched coincidence too far.

No, it was clear to everyone in 1976 that something was untoward. By the time the heat was over at the end of August there was a feeling that we had to do something, to plan for hotter, drier summers and to cut carbon dioxide emissions. We had to design better water supplies, wean ourselves off our oil addiction and start fitting things such as solar panels to roofs.

But 30 years later we still don’t have enough water in the South, solar panels still haven’t sprouted on our roofs, wave power machines still can’t be seen along the coastlines. We’re still talking about them. True, we’ve got energy-efficient light bulbs and more ecofriendly fridges and freezers, but the electricity saved is being chewed up by new domestic gadgets. Cars and planes are guzzling more fuel than ever. And we use gallons more water than ever before. It is all so depressing.

Scientists agree that we can expect increasingly hot and prolonged heatwaves as climate change bites deep. The short, sharp, typically wimpy British hot spell followed by showers is giving way to something much more sinister. New high temperature records are falling at an alarming rate — it was only in August 2003 when 38.5C (101.3F) set a new UK record, and yesterday we saw a new record high temperature for July. Soon we will inevitably face the first 40C (104F) recorded in the UK. It all fits a much bigger global trend — the ten warmest years on record have all occurred in the past 11 years. In future we may experience a climate warmer than anything experienced since prehistoric time, possibly not since the last great hot period about 100,000 years ago, when hippos roamed England.

Those sorts of stifling temperatures are going to lead to a huge demand for more air-conditioning, which means more power needed, which means more pollution. We may yet find ourselves in the position of Californians, who suffer power blackouts in the summer because of the huge energy demands from air-conditioning.

So, how many more record-breaking heatwaves will it take before we start to take climate change seriously? And when will the Government take the lead? When will it force all new buildings to have their own power generators — solar panels, wind turbines, whatever — and compulsory rain traps to collect rainwater? We need bigger incentives to fit existing buildings with energy and water-saving gadgets. We also need to make the utility companies buy back home-made power at a decent price. And if we are truly serious about climate change, forget about grants for fitting energy-saving devices: they should be given away free.

We need to be more aware of how much carbon dioxide we use. Retailers, for example, could be made to reveal the carbon dioxide used in their products or services, such as air flights — after all, the cost of road fund licences is linked to carbon emissions. While we’re at it, impose a special carbon tax on airline fares because aviation fuel is untaxed. And tinkering around with a few wind turbines is useless; we need a huge, concerted effort to change our ways.

Unfortunately, it takes a colossal disaster before the big political decisions are taken — whether it was the building of the Thames Barrier, after the disastrous floods of 1953 that killed 300 people, or the introduction of smokeless fuel zones after the lethal Great Smog of 1952 when 12,000 were killed. In the intense heatwave of August 2003, more than 2,000 people are reckoned to have died, but still it made no difference. How many more deaths will it take before climate change is taken seriously?

Paul Simons writes the Weather Eye column for The Times

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