How many more blazes like the Cairngorms fire will ravage Scotland? Is this what summer in Scotland means now?

I was 50 miles away in Aberdeen when it took hold and saw the yellowy smoke shrouding the Dee Valley. You could smell it, even taste it. The sheer scale of it, creeping across the landscape like a blanket of smog, underlined how much of the Highlands must be on fire. In Nethy Bridge, it left local people in tears and grieving for a revered, fragile and ancient landscape. Tourists stayed away and livelihoods suffered. But the fire is not just significant in and of itself. Coming after the even larger Dava Moor blaze last year, it confirms a pattern of increasingly frequent major wildfires across Scotland.

Now many parts of rural England have caught fire, including the New Forest in Hampshire, famous for its free-roaming ponies, and RSPB Minsmere in Suffolk, home to BBC’s Springwatch. A fire in the West Midlands has gutted 19 homes. Meanwhile in continental Europe, nearly 6000 square kilometres of land have burned this year so far. As I write, Belgium’s biggest ever wildfire is heading towards Germany.

Ten years ago, wildfires were an occasional occurrence; now they dominate Europe’s summers. The speed with which they have taken hold is breathtaking, but the scientific consensus is that they will get steadily worse unless we do something to arrest the spread.

There’s no getting away from what that something is. The message in the flames is clear: we have to stop procrastinating and cut carbon emissions, fast. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that while adaptation to wildfires is possible for a while, there will come a point where we can no longer adapt and the damage is permanent. At that point, we are in very........

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