October has been one of the wettest on record. Heavy rains characterised long stretches of the month, and on one particular day the amount of rain that fell on the Maltese Islands was normally what we would get on average for the whole month.

This has followed one of the hottest summers on record, with three long heat waves that made several weeks unbearably stifling in June, July and August. Over most of summer, the temperatures were above the norm.

So far, autumn has not brought cold days, but the rainfall has been somewhat extraordinary.

We will have to get used to hotter summers and rainier winters, as things are not likely to improve anytime soon, if ever.

News about the perils of climate change to humanity and life in general has not been amiss in the past years, not to say decades. But world leaders continue to disagree and dither as to what needs to be done to attempt to reverse the trend.

Attempt is the key word here, because there are some scientists who believe that we are already too late. Yet little concrete action has been taken, and the people with power continue to point fingers at each other while extreme conditions get further apart – the earth is getting warmer, year after year, and this is triggering heavy rainfall with the resultant floods, higher-than-normal temperatures and the rising of sea levels, aided by the melting of glaciers.

The world is one minute to midnight, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said as world leaders gathered for the landmark COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow yesterday. But his words of caution, and alarm, have been said over and over again these past few decades, and they have unfortunately not brought about the action that is needed.

Only last weekend, the leaders of the Group of 20 countries “haggled for two days in Rome over steps to tackle climate change”, according to an Associated Press report. “They laboured to bridge the gap between a push for a tougher climate stance from European countries… and concerns from China, India and Russia, where fossil fuel and coal play a major role,” the report said.

It’s always a question of the wording in these circumstances, and one of the problems over this past weekend was the deadline when G20 nations need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, that is producing emissions at a level where they can be removed from the atmosphere by oceans, forests and abatement measures. The richer seven countries agreed to do so by 2050, but the rest decided on “by or around mid-century” which, of course, leaves so much room for interpretation.

No target has again been set for phasing out coal, a decision which, again, does not favour any concrete action by the countries involved.

Time continues to pass, very quickly too, and there is little commitment to rectify a situation that is progressively getting worse.

Future generations will blame us for leaving them an Earth which is worse off than we found it.