Last Thursday night I arrived at a hotel in Potsdam, outside Berlin, for a conference. It was after 10pm and the heat of the day was fading. It was still 31 degrees.

Even before I had properly checked in, the man at the desk gave me a stricken look: “We have no air conditioning!”

He said it as though he were announcing: “We have no water!”

Over the next two days, the temperature edged up to 40 degrees. Nearly 6,000km north of the equator, the heat felt almost solid, not so much a quality as a substance, an invisible barrier you had to push yourself through.

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The town felt lopsided. All the sunny sides of the streets were deserted, their occupants tilted on to the shaded flanks. One of the speakers at the conference began to feel ill and had to be taken home before she could deliver her talk.

And yet: seeing is no longer believing. Nor is feeling. Or sweating. Or burning. Or wildfires. Or heatstroke. At a fundamental level, we do not believe what we are experiencing: the catastrophic effects of global heating. It is the latest, and surely the deadliest, version of the unknown known.

In his essay The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud wrote that “an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of........

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