A thermal image of Earth on August 4, 2003, shows the Sahara’s high temperatures spreading north, engulfing Europe in a heat wave that had lethal effects. Such satellite views are among the new tools giving a clearer view of the weather ahead.

Even if the air-conditioning system installed in1954 were fully functioning, it would have been inevitably hot inside the chamber of Commons during the summer of 2003, when an exceptional planetary wave of heat was flying over Europe. As David Boswell Reid had thought, the air of the chamber seem to be extremely sensitive to political variations; the complaints about the insufferable indoors atmosphere in that day reverberating at the architectural scale of the assembly the proportions of a planetary-warming risk that had entered into the agenda of global politics. Indeed, despite all Reid’s effort to find the adequate air conditions to house government, his design had to be constantly updated, as if the alterations in the ventilation system of the chamber could be read as a sort of index to the variations in the historical political climate.

The last proposed modification was made in 2004, after the British military intelligence have launched an alarm of a possible anthrax attack to the Commons. A £600,000 airtight screen running from floor to ceiling was proposed to be used as a barrier between the public gallery and the parliamentary sits, conforming a smaller chamber within equipped with an independent ventilation system. Since air would not flow freely, speakers installed around the gallery would permit that the debates were still held in public. Together with the transparency of the glass and the safer isolated atmospheres, all the system working to ensure that democracy was being properly defended in a state of war in which enemy’s attack could unexpectedly come through air.[1]

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[1] On the reported alterations at the house see the article in Telegraph Anthrax threat to MPs in the House, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1460021/Anthrax-threat-to-MPs-in-House.html