Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures warmed roughly 0.85 degrees Celsius from 1880 to 2012, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That may not sound like much, but on a global scale that small amount of warming has resulted in weirder and wilder weather such as heatwaves and giant downpours, melting glaciers, disappearing snow cover, shrinking sea ice, rising seas and increasing human health issues.

Studies say that that amount of warming in 135 years is unprecedented in the history of Earth.

What’s even more worrying is the fact that temperatures could rise at an even greater rate. Scientists in the US, for example, say that the states will warm by another 2.5 degrees in the coming decades.

Imagine how such an increase could affect our climate and, indeed, our daily lives. Europe is currently gripped by a cruel heatwave that is aptly being referred to as ‘Lucifer.’ There are wildfires all along Europe’s southern border; France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Romania, just to name a few.

In Greece the authorities closed the popular Acropolis site a couple of weeks back when the mercury hit 39 degrees Celsius.

In Italy the wine grape harvest began ten days early due to the effects of the summer’s heatwave and drought.

The situation in Malta has been nothing short of a living hell.

The Met Office told us this week that, although this year’s heatwaves were not the hottest, they are getting longer and longer.

The extreme heat is also affecting agricultural produce, as a number of farmers pointed out to this newspaper earlier this week. This is only adding to a growing list of problems, at the top of which is the serious lack of rainwater.

Still, despite all the freak weather and the impossible-to-miss signs, there are those who refuse to accept that climate change is real. This is a much bigger problem when one of them is the President of the Unites States of America – the ‘leader of the free world’. Trump, who has backed out of the landmark Paris climate deal, had in the past said that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to damage US competitiveness. And statements by his team are often clash with established mainstream science.

Fortunately, the other signatories of the deal, including the European Union, are still sticking to the plan, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2°C.

So a plan exists for mitigating global warming, even if it can be argued that this is not ambitious enough and not all major players are playing along.

But other, equally important plans are needed. According to a report published in the respected journal Lancet Planetary Health, heatwaves are forecast to begin taking the lives of some 350 Maltese a year by 2071.

The study says that southern Europe is destined to be hit the hardest based on projections for heat waves and droughts. Almost everyone living in Malta, Italy, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Cyprus, Portugal and Slovenia would be affected by such weather-related disasters, causing 700 deaths per million people annually.

In view of these worrying statements, the country should start preparing for a change in mentality in anything from construction and insulation, to public transport, to gearing our health services to deal with a different kind of casualty. Climate will become and even bigger killer and we cannot afford to be complacent.