Summer wouldn’t be complete without hordes of disgruntled British tourists being evacuated from their hotels, flown home early or spending their holidays sprawled on the floor of an international airport. But are the scenes of Rhodes really a symptom of a the world ‘being on fire’, as Greta Thunberg would put it?

Actually, in spite of scenes of burning forests on Rhodes and elsewhere being presented daily on our television screens, 2023 has not been a devastating year for forest fires in Europe.