We've just enjoyed our first blissful sleepover weekend with our 20-month granddaughter, Hazel, so maybe that softened me up.
Or perhaps it was a week's leave away from the news that rusted my BBC armour of emotional detachment from the climate story.
Either way, I confess to a gut-tightening sense of foreboding when Hazel left and I caught up with North America's killer heat dome on TV.
That's not because new record temperatures were set in the north-western US and Canada - that happens from time to time. No, it's because old records were smashed so dramatically.
The previous all-time Canada record of 45C was set in the 1937 Dust Bowl era when, like this year, the parched ground failed to mitigate temperatures.
Normally records like this are over-topped by a fraction of a degree, but this year the former high was obliterated on three days running.
The final temperature in the town of Lytton was fully 4.6C higher than the old record. Emissions from human activities inarguably contributed to the rise, increasing global average temperature by about 1.2C since the late 1800s.
Computer models are what scientists use to try to second-guess the future behaviour of Earth's climate. But they take a very broad look across the global temperatures - they are not as accurate for smaller areas where the projected temperature extremes may be over-topped on a local level… extreme extremes, if you like.
Scientists are now striving to predict some of these crazy weather events that are currently taking policy-makers by surprise.
It's not just heat waves, but also pulses of torrential rain that cause devastating floods on a local level. Drains were built when no-one thought a harmless natural gas like CO2 could wreak havoc.
The UK Met Office hopes its shiny new megacomputer will be able to make projections on a much more closely defined scale, although some will be sceptical about its ability to do that.
Meanwhile, temperatures keep rising and shifting scientific goalposts. What's more, Canada's extreme extreme (sic) was cranked up by a global temperature rise of just 1.2C so far on pre-industrial levels.
But the world is probably heading for 1.5C of heating early next decade, and temperatures will push onwards to 2C and above unless policies radically change. What do we imagine things will be like with a rise of 2C, which was until recently considered to be a relatively "safe" level of change?
Baroness Worthington, a lead author on the UK's Climate Change Act, told me: "Concerned scientists are no longer concerned - they are freaked out.
"They're worrying there might not be a 'safe landing' on the climate. We are working on the idea of safe carbon budgets (the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere without badly disrupting the climate). But what if there is no safe carbon budget?
"What if the 'safe' carbon budget is zero. We can't sugar-coat the potential realities of this."
Politicians are working to avert the worst of those potential realities, but even the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher remarked in the late 1980s that making such an experiment with our only planet was folly.
Some scientists are warning that areas of the world will become uninhabitable if current trends continue. So what are our leaders doing to keep us safe?
Well, they're talking a good show, and doubtless some really mean to curb climate change. But the impacts of global heating are happening right now, whereas major nations plan to phase out emissions by 2050.
President Biden says CO2 will be halved against 2005 levels this decade. But his proposed investments in clean technology are being resisted by Republicans.
GM and others have promised to sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035. But the president has set no date for electrifying the US car fleet.
What's more his climate envoy John Kerry has attracted criticism for insisting that US lifestyles don't need to change, whereas experts say protecting the climate requires new technology as well as behavioural changes such as eating less meat and driving smaller cars.
And there's a gap in the policies of even a world-leading nation such as the UK, where the government plans a £27bn programme of road-building.
And, even though rail use has plunged since the pandemic, Boris Johnson is spending £100bn+ on the HS2 rail project that won't be carbon neutral until around the end of the century - no-one knows for sure.