Whenever a fire starts and it’s hot, usually in summer, the climate change zealots come out to gloat about how the walls of flame and smoke exist as tangible proof that the world is ending.

The reality is usually more upsetting.

Most fires these days can be traced back to arson, lit shortly after weather presenters have spent a few days painting their maps a scary shade of red and warning everyone that ‘they’re all going to die in the heat wave’.

The summer weather was given a name worthy of the climate cataclysm – Cerberus – after the three-headed dog that guards the underworld. This led to hyperbolic headlines such as, A heatwave named Cerberus has southern Europe in its jaws, and it’s only going to get worse.

You mean, it’s hot in Europe during summer? Isn’t that what the entire tourist trade is predicated on?

According to Wired, Cerberus is not the official name of the heatwave, but rather ‘chosen by Italian weather website iLMeteo’. There’s a bit of a war going on about who gets to name these periods of hot weather. I’m sure if an asteroid was headed toward Earth to wipe us out, we’d be bickering over what to call that too.

Having been in the Adriatic recently, it was warm but not world-ending hot. The Australians shrugged off the temperature, still in their cardigans, and pointed out that fewer Europeans would die if they installed a couple of air-conditioners instead of basking under ceiling fans like it’s 1976.

Unsurprisingly, once the weather forecasters were done drumming up climate change terror about the heatwave, fires started popping up across Greece.

Horror stories have emerged over the last few days about tourists who were flying in, despite the danger, and subsequently finding themselves running toward the water as their hotels filled with smoke and ash. After days of complaints, empty planes have finally been sent to evacuate tourists.

Today, the headlines are asking if arson is behind the latest blazes working their way across the Greek island of Rhodes. Officials have said that there are ‘early indications of arson’.

An investigation has been launched into the blazes. Parkland does not magically combust on its own, and the Greek landscape is relatively stable in the heat.

‘Fires are set by human hands. Whether it is due to negligence or fraud will be seen [but] people have been summoned for statements and others will be summoned. As soon as we have complete information – because the investigation is in full swing, we will make announcements…’ said Vassilis Vathrakogiannis, speaking on behalf of the Rhodes Fire Department.

Rhodes has been burning for seven days, while other tourist locations, such as Corfu, face smaller localised fires. Corfu’s fires are also believed to have been deliberately lit, with the Deputy Mayor for Tourism and Construction speaking to the BBC about suspicions that they were started ‘by a group of people’. ‘[They] get pleasure out of this with the pain of other people,’ he said.

Greece has been here before. Many people were arrested and charged over the 2021 fires in Greece, which were considered to be some of the worst on record. Some of the blazes were described as a ‘deliberate organised criminal activity’. In the devastating fires of 2007, arson was listed as a major cause of the blaze and some of the blazes were even suspected to be a form of terror attack. Charges of arson and murder were eventually brought.

As over 32,000 precautionary evacuations are carried out for the fires on Rhodes and surrounding areas, the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, told his nation that they had ‘more difficult days ahead’.

‘We are at war against the fires,’ said the Prime Minister.

This pattern – weather reporters talking up apocalyptic heatwaves followed by thrill-seeking arsonists – happens over and over and over in all corners of the world. The preachy broadcasters are right about one thing, this is a human problem. It’s not carbon dioxide at fault, but the busy hands of criminals who know they are unlikely to be punished.

Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall