Britain's summer of drought and heat acquired its smallest ledger Thursday: house flies plaguing homes across the country, the Guardian reported, in numbers residents describe as biblical. [1]

The same day brought the season's other insect entry — an unusual influx of hummingbird hawk-moths, the migratory day-fliers, recorded in sightings up and down the country. [2]

Both phenomena belong to the summer the paper has covered through reservoirs, heat deaths, and drought declarations. But the discipline that governs the larger ledgers governs this one: a single season's insects are a single season's signal. No study has attached either the flies or the moths to climate attribution, and no trend has been established. A hot summer's insects are evidence of a hot summer — nothing more, until the entomological record at season's end says otherwise. The attribution reflex, wherever it appears, is the risk here, not the record.

What Thursday's reports honestly establish is texture: a nation swatting at its windows and photographing moths at its scorched geraniums, living inside the weather it has been reading about. The flies are a nuisance with a cause nobody has published; the moths are migrants having a good year. The attribution door stays shut.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York