We're recording this episode on the hottest day of the year, but hopefully we'll still

be able to disagree fairly agreeably all the same.

How are you anyway, Alice?

What are we going to kick off with?

Well, I think we have to kick off with the heat.

I know I'm getting really bored with talking about how hot it is, but it is bloody hot.

I'm actually sitting in a very, very hot and steamy office somewhere in SW1.

I also, just on Heatwave's Rory, I read an extraordinary piece, as you know I'm quite big on the mental health agenda, I know you are too.

And I read a piece on the conversation by a couple of professors, one from Oxford Lawrence Wainwright and one from Zurich, Eileen Neumann.

And it had some horrific stats about the impact of heat waves on people's mental health, including for example, every 1% rise in monthly average temperature leads to a 2.2% rise in mental health deaths.

And the other thing, as you know, my brother had schizophrenia at a lifetime of anti-psychotics.

And the other thing is anti-psychotics are very dependent, lithium is the same for bipolar, they're very dependent upon the body temperature.

And one of the side effects of anti-psychotics is that people decreases your thirst, so it stops you feeling the need to drink.

So it was just a fascinating sort of, you know, I think we all sort of see the stuff of, you know, people frying eggs on the pavement and are we going to, is the planet going to disself destruction or that.

But then you just realize that even something like mental health has this sort of, you know, pretty stunning impact of the current heat wave.

So one of the things that I've, I've just been out on the west coast of America, one of the reasons I'm sounding a little croaky.

So I think I've been traveling for something like 32 hours with two, two small children, I just, just basically got off my last easy jet plane and into this conversation.

But one of the things that's very striking there is that essentially there is now a drought stretching from Colorado to California.

And California produces about half the fruit and vegetables in the United States.

And of course, we're seeing the same in the Horn of Africa, we're seeing the same in Italy.

And I think this is probably the first time that we're really seeing very, very clearly the way that climate change is going to feed into economic recession and feed into problems and supply chains.

I think this is the year where that's really going to become most obvious.

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