There is a special kind of corporate poetry in a bank publishing a survey about how unbearably hot Britain has become, with a precise threshold, 25.1'C, to be exact, above which the nation's shoppers simply cannot be expected to shop. Barclays didn't only notice the heat wave. It quantified it. It created a little thermometer of consumer despair and handed it to the press on a Thursday, as if the weather were a market condition it happened to be observing from a safe, air-conditioned distance, rather than a system it has spent the last decade helping to fuel. The findings, as reported, are almost touching in their specificity. Britons will commute up to 24.2'C and then, apparently quietly give up. Sixty percent of companies are now investing in heat-adaptation technology, air conditioning, retrofitting, 'wider sustainability providers' to use the bank's own phrase. In the second quarter, Barclays' corporate air-conditioning clients' cash flow for corporate clients rose 4.3% or so....
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