The European Parliament couldn’t resist getting in a global warming reference in its sympathy motion, passed Wednesday. Parliament, it intoned, “Expresses its deepest sympathy with the families of the victims and notes with regret that the often predicted impact of climate change has become a reality in that poor sections of society living in coastal regions bore the brunt of the hurricane.” Of course, before global warming poor people living in coastal regions just watched happily as hurricanes sailed overhead to strike rich people inland. It’s a plot, I tell you!

Meanwhile, just to confirm that the European Parliament is a strange place inhabited by strange people with a warped sense of reality, along comes another motion on climate. It starts off, “A. having regard to the instability displayed by the European climate this summer, ranging from the severe fires in southern Europe which have devastated more than 300 000 ha of vegetation and forests in Spain, Portugal and France to the torrential rains in Austria, southern Germany, Hungary and Romania which have brought on large-scale flooding.” You read that right. In Europe, fires are now climate.