THE future equivalent of 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' might well be your offspring or grandchildren questioning you in 2040 about the year 2015.

They will then be 25 years older, and living in quite a different world. Just as a century ago those soldiers in the 1915 Somme trenches didn't expect that their sons would again be at risk, wading into the sea at Dunkirk in 1940, your children will also be aghast at what we allowed to happen.

Imagine the scene. Your sitting there in shorts, looking at your sweating dad, and you're both thinking about air conditioning, as for the third time that week the temperature has risen to 42 C (108 F). It was only ten years ago that the national record of 40 degrees was set in Kent. Mind you, it could be worse, as your uncle in California is having to endure temperatures more than ten degrees higher.

At first the suggestion of some cooling sea breezes at Scarborough sounds attractive, but you wouldn't be welcome as the whole of the sea front is a building site with workmen trying to repair the damage caused by a rising sea level, made even worse by the largest storm surge in living memory.

Getting there will be a problem as the east west rail route is still being electrified, and the roads will be almost solid with traffic, and not coping. Car numbers have risen from just over 500 per thousand people in 2015 to close on 800 in 2040, and many of them are old, still CO2 spouting, as electric cars remain expensive.

Then add in the number of extra folk as the UK population is now in the mid seventy millions rather than mid sixties, mirroring the world population that has added nearly two billion since 2015 – a staggering nine billion total. And you can see the results in the local landscape.

Bradford's wild deer, 700 of them, are just a memory as their woodland retreats have been reduced, trimmed by housing and concrete hard surfaces that increase the run off. Parts of Bingley have been under water five times in the last decade, once for a month, and its not just the flood plains that are inundated now.

Your wrist watch is now a television and it's just flashed up the most recent figure for CO2 in the atmosphere. It first passed 400 in 2015, and is now a damaging 450 ppm, when it should be below 350 if the climate is to remain stable.