Can we protect the planet while still leading normal lives?
It wasn’t so long ago that people – not just cynics, or even sceptics – expressed the view that climate change was an entirely natural phenomenon. They said it was to do with sunspots or natural cycles and that, in any case, whatever it was, it was a problem for the twenty-second century, not the twenty-first.
Acknowledging at most that coal was not an ideal fuel and that improved household insulation was probably a good idea, they mocked the scientific consensus that warned of the chaos to come, appealing instead to “good sense” to see us through. Those who wanted to put the climate version of Project Fear into a historical context liked to recall that vines were grown in England in the time of the Tudors and that Victorians sometimes got to skate on the Thames over Christmas and New Year.
In Britain, no discussion on global warming was complete without reminders of the frigid winter that paralysed the nation in 1963 or the summer of 1976, when temperatures reached as high as 32 degrees celsius, 90 degrees fahrenheit.
What is missing in these wilful misreadings of the data is any sense of an aggregate change in weather patterns. Climate deniers preferred to take their lead from the likes of US Senator James Inhofe, who, in mid-winter 2015 as his response to the fact that the previous summer had been officially declared the hottest on record, brought a snowball into the Senate chamber as proof that it was “very cold out” in Washington DC.
So what are the facts? To start with, no one can, or should, pretend that Armageddon is just around the corner. The Earth is remarkably resilient and there are still good years as well as bad. Next summer, for example could be almost normal. There could be floods in the autumn. The issue is that the bad years are starting to outnumber the good, and the trend is accelerating.
In the US, four of the five hottest summers since records began have occurred this century. The warming trend has been pretty well continuous since 1970. In Europe, the Mediterranean climate that used to be confined to a belt roughly south of Bordeaux, Turin and Zagreb has extended at least a hundred miles north, while the Club Med countries themselves are experiencing heatwaves that are hotter and longer-lasting than any in history.
Much of Africa could become virtually uninhabitable if present trends, added to population growth, continue for the next 30 years, with results for immigration patterns that can only be imagined. The same is true of the Middle East and large swathes of south Asia, where temperatures in excess of 50 degrees celsius have left millions of people short of water, hardly daring to leave their homes. China, too, is feeling the heat, with records this year broken in close to 100 of its cities.
The UK is not among the worst affected. Scotland has enjoyed a mild summer. There have even been floods in Northern Ireland. But the Southeast, centred on London, has seen temperatures soar, with hosepipe bans forecast to last until the autumn. The Met Office says that England as a whole recorded its driest July since 1935 and that rainfall in the south in particular reached its lowest level since 1836.
Warnings of the threat posed by wildfires are in force, and people have been urged not to light bonfires or barbecues or to let off fireworks. Farmers report that they are having to ration water for their animals and that the grass isn’t growing, so that they are relying on hay intended as winter fodder.
To make things worse, the heat is continuing to rise and could hit as high as 40 degrees in parts of the country before the summer’s end.
In France, a country that likes to think of itself as warm and sunny but which in fact has always exhibited both northern and southern characteristics, the trend in recent years gives little cause for optimism. The prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, has warned that the country is facing the “most severe drought” ever recorded, obliging the government to activate a crisis unit with draconian powers.
Many areas, she said, were living through a “historic” moment as the country endures its third heatwave this summer. “The exceptional drought we are currently experiencing is depriving many municipalities of water and is a tragedy for our farmers, our ecosystems and biodiversity,” she said.
The Southwest and Deep South have had the worst of it, but in the north, too, the countryside is broiling. In Brittany, traditionally one of the country’s wettest regions, there has been no rain of consequence for more than two months, leaving rivers dry and reservoirs at critically low levels. In parts of the region that typically regard a hot day as anything higher than 20 degrees, thermometers have registered temperatures as high as 42 degrees, leading to an outbreak of wildfires in the hills of the Mont d’Arrée – the duration and intensity of which have shocked local residents.
Water shortages are, of course, the inevitable flipside of heatwaves. The whole of France is on drought alert, including the Paris region, home to more than 12 million people. Environment minister, Christophe Bechu, reported last week that rainfall across the country in July was just 12 per cent of normal.
Elsewhere in Europe, the situation is little better. Water levels along the 750-mile course of the Rhine are critically low. The river system, linking the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland is vital for the transport of bulk materials, including coal, chemicals, salt, oil and heavy machinery. It has been estimated that just one month of low water translates in Germany to a one percent cut in industrial production. The Rhine was last closed to river traffic in 2018. This year, barges are travelling light, carrying just one third of their normal load, but without rain the near certainty is for an extended shutdown.
The same is true in Italy, where the Po and its 141 tributaries, extending across Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, irrigate land responsible for 40 per cent of the country’s food production. Today, the river is reduced to a trickle. So low is the level of water that this week a Second World War bomb was exposed, stuck in the mud near Mantua.
According to the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, Spain and Portugal are experiencing their driest period of weather for a thousand years – a claim justified by records dating back to the Moorish occupation. The same is true of Greece. A spokesman for AEMET, the Spanish meteorological agency, warned that temperatures across Iberia were expected to keep increasing and that a further decrease in rainfall was likely.
Alright, so the situation is bad and could well get worse year by year. So what should we do about it? Indeed, what can we do?
In the UK in the summer of 1976 – the driest for more than 200 years – the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson appointed Denis Howell to be Britain’s drought minister, advising him to do a rain dance on behalf of the nation. It worked. In fact, it worked so well that less than a week later Howell was rebranded as minister for floods.
But no such rainmaker is in office today. The British Government, like its counterparts across the world, looks to be powerless in the face of events. It is all very well promising rain tomorrow when what we need is rain today. The global response to climate change is, to say the least, spotty, and even if we all acted together, it would take years, perhaps a century, for temperatures to drop to, say, 1970s levels and rain to start falling as it dd before.
It’s not as if we’ve failed to identify the tools needed to do the job. Electric vehicles; new atomic energy plants (including small modular reactors, as proposed by Rolls-Royce); a rapid expansion of solar and wind power, with a corresponding drop in the use of fossil fuels; properly functioning water storage; fewer farting cows; more high-efficiency aircraft: all these things and more are promised for the future – and they must happen. There can be no backsliding.
But as the eighteenth century Irish MP, Sir Boyle Roche, once put it: “Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity – for what has posterity done for us?”
In the short run, the world cannot be put on hold. We have to keep the lights on; our homes and workplaces don’t (yet) heat themselves; the wheels of industry and commerce must be allowed to keep on turning; cars and lorries can’t switch from petrol and diesel overnight. And if this means a more gradual phasing out of fossil fuels, so be it. A car-free Rome won’t be built in a day.
The Green lobby demands levels of sacrifice over the next 40 years that stand zero chance of public acceptance, not only in the developed world but right across the globe. Any party anywhere that promised to take its voters’ economy down a radical eco-path, with Gandhi’s spinning wheel rather than an iPhone as its symbol, would be lucky to trouble the scorers at election time.
Compromise, working with the grain of technological advance, is the only practical way forward. Hair shirts are for fetishists. The rest of us prefer Marks & Spencer. People won’t vote for their own impoverishment or that of their children. Why would they? The real question then becomes, what can we do that protects the planet in the longer term while allowing us, as the generation in situ, to go on leading something like a normal life?
It is one of the two key questions of our time (the other being how to avoid nuclear annihilation). We may be able to sideline it today, but the longer we leave it unanswered, the more we, or, more likely, our heirs, will come to regret it. Temperatures across the world are rising; rainfall patterns are shifting in their wake. Our blue planet, possibly the only one of its kind in the universe, is suffocating. We must do all that we can to let it breathe, and we have to start now.