The Forecast Today: Hot and Overpopulated - and Those Mice, What About Those Mice?

Wow, here's a shocker. The last decade was the hottest decade on record. Here's another shocker. By the time 2030 rolls around, the 2020s will be the new "hottest decade on record." See what you've got to look forward to?

Britain has been going through a record heatwave. Judging by the swarms crowding its beaches, it must have been hot enough to fry Covid-19 out of existence. Maybe that's just nature's way of culling the herd. Who knows?

Here's a shamelessly vulgar American comedian, Bill Burr, who argues that overpopulation is the root of all our evils or at least an awful lot of them.



Meanwhile, in other news of the Apocalypse. It's been a bad year for vast regions in Africa and South Asia as waves of locusts have devastated crops. Germany is having its own plague. Field mice.

Across Germany, the effects of a succession of dry summers and mild winters have enabled the mice – and increasingly voles – to thrive, leaving an estimated 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) stripped bare by the rodents and now browning in the current heatwave. 

Farmers said field mice had been tunnelling under the fields and gnawing at the roots of crops for months, with the neighbouring regions of Thuringia, Saxony Anhalt and Lower Saxony the worst hit. In the central state of Thuringia, as much as a quarter of the crops are affected, with damage estimated at around €450 (£407) for every hectare of wheat. Farmers’ representatives have estimated that two-thirds of their income will be lost as a result and many said they have had to buy in extra animal feed.