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Even without the scientists telling us, we can all see a new pattern emerging: freaky weather, unusual temperatures, ice sheets crashing into the sea, migrating birds turning up ahead of schedule, plants flowering early…

From the UK and Europe to Australia and the Americas, this chapter offers some snapshots of the way our planet is changing around – and because of – us.

The graph below shows the global temperature for each year from 1850 to 2006. Climate experts use 14 °C as a reference point. The wavy line reveals the unmistakeable trend – that the world has been getting hotter over the past 150 years.

As surely as the Wimbledon tennis tournament brings rain, fresh strawberries say lazy summer sunshine. But in 2007 you were more likely to be eating strawberries at Easter than in June. A bizarrely hot spring meant they were ripe and ready to pick by April. Too early for Wimbledon. Too early for the students who normally pick them. And too early for the strawberry farmers who employ the students.

The last time April in England was as warm as in 2007 Abraham Lincoln was still alive and Lewis Carroll was polishing

Global warming: the hard data

off Alice in Wonderland. It followed an unusually mild January, February and March. Frogspawn thrived in garden ponds in February, and insects like peacock butterflies, bumblebees and ladybirds appeared earlier than usual. Then came what looked like being the wettest summer in the UK since the outbreak of the First World War.

As England basked in its April sunshine Spain was doused in unseasonal rain, with disastrous consequences as salad crops were flooded, leading to soaring tomato prices. And then, while the UK saw flooding, Europe flipped into yet another heat wave.

Of course our weather is changeable – it always has been. One hot day doesn’t make a summer, and a few record temperatures don’t necessarily prove that the world’s climate is in the throes of fundamental change. But average temperatures are definitely rising – as worldwide records clearly show. And we are now seeing the very kinds of changes to weather patterns and the Earth’s natural systems, habitats and wildlife that scientists have for years been predicting will flow from global warming.