This is the Guardian. Here in the UK we've finally had a pause in the rain, but while basking in the

sunshine you might have noticed one of our warm weather companions has largely been missing.

The wet conditions have made it a bad year for butterflies.

According to the charity Butterfly Conservation, numbers appear to be at record lows.

It is the continuation of a very long and worrying trend.

80% of the butterfly species that occur in the UK have decreased either in how abundant

they are at sites that are intensively monitored or in how

widespread they are since the 1970s. In fact experts think the problem goes back

even further. We're only catching the tail end of what's probably a much bigger decline.

Habitat destruction has historically been the main driver behind the drops in numbers,

but now the climate crisis is piling on the pressure.

Butterflies have been here longer than we have. They are used to Britain's notoriously

variable climate, but the extremes are getting more extreme, so that is pushing them into conditions

that they perhaps have never experienced before, certainly not for many thousands and thousands of years.

And what we're seeing in butterflies tells us something much bigger

and should be ringing alarm bells.

They're the canary and the coal mine to use the rather tired phrase.

You know we don't need to stop climate change to save the butterflies. We need to stop

climate change to save ourselves.

But there are signs we can reverse their fortunes, help them face extreme weather patterns,

and learn what we need to do for the rest of our insects, and us too.

I'm Phoebe Weston, a Guardian Biodiversity reporter and this is Science Weekly.

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