The news agenda moved on. The atmosphere didn’t.

For the past couple of years, climate has quietly drifted down the news agenda. Other crises have crowded in, political attention has moved elsewhere, and a kind of fatigue has settled over a subject that once led every bulletin.

Then, at seven o’clock on the evening of Friday 14 August, millions of phones across England and Wales went off at once. “There is a very high risk of wildfires nationally,” the government’s emergency alert read, telling people to put away the disposable barbecues and firepits and to report any sign of fire by calling 999. Officials described it as the most extensive use of the alert system in response to an active incident. Around 37 fires were burning at the time, 19 homes had been destroyed at Stourbridge, sales of disposable barbecues were banned nationally, 200 military personnel were deployed, the temperature reached 38.1C at Kew, and nearly three-quarters of England and all of Wales were in drought.

It is a strange sort of fatigue that survives the state texting you about the weather.

The wider picture is worse. By mid-August, close to 490,000 hectares had burned across the EU, around 13 per cent above the fourteen-year average. Spain accounts for roughly 38 per cent of that total. France is having its worst fire year since records began, passing the previous high set in 2022. The UK’s own figure, more than 22,000 hectares, is the highest since 2012. And summer 2026 remains on course to be the UK’s hottest on record, according to the Met Office.

The detail that should give us pause is where the fires are burning. Blazes have threatened the outskirts of Bordeaux and Madrid, and reached Atlantic regions usually spared this kind of thing, driven by exceptional drought and long, punishing heatwaves. “As soon as you have prolonged heat waves, the risk for fire is increasing quite dramatically,” says Stefan Doerr of Swansea University’s Centre for Wildfire Research. The season is getting longer and the fires more severe, he notes, and faster than the climate models predicted.

Fire is not the only front. On Wednesday morning, a section of glacier gave way at around 5,200 metres in the Himalayas, sending ice, rock and meltwater down through the valley into Nepal. More than 360 people are confirmed dead and over 1,400 are missing, hundreds of them foreign nationals, with the numbers still moving as this is written. Researchers have been careful not to hang a single collapse on a warming atmosphere, and they are right to be careful. The backdrop is less disputed: ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya has roughly doubled since 2000.

None of this is beyond argument. Sceptics point to forestry and land management, not just a warming atmosphere, and they are not entirely wrong that how we tend the land matters. But the underlying signal is hard to wave away, and there is a second, quieter problem running alongside the first. Attention has drifted even as the physical evidence has strengthened. The story is getting bigger while our appetite to hear it shrinks.

That gap is precisely what The planet hasn’t stopped burning at LIFI26 sets out to close. Chris Packham CBE hosts, joined by Dr Mya-Rose Craig and Juergen Maier CBE, for a conversation about climate fatigue, political inaction, and the fight to keep environmental catastrophe on the radar when so many agendas have quietly moved on.

The news agenda moved on. The atmosphere didn’t.

The planet hasn’t stopped burning takes place on Thursday 8 October, 8pm to 9.30pm, in the Quarry Theatre at Leeds Playhouse. Tickets are on sale now.