Last week I had family to stay – my twenty-something nephew and his friend, blown in from England after their exams. They landed in a cool southeasterly, and marvelled at the green of their surroundings.
You must have heard this. Visitors walk off the ferry, look around, and say “it’s so GREEN here!”
Although domestic septic systems contribute much to the island’s verdant foliage, it is the island’s tree-huggers, volunteer weeders and conservationists who painted the island green.
In the middle of last century, visitors were greeted by a vista of sheep nibbled grass and rolling, barren hills which burned to copper in the summer.
My nephew’s homeland, like much of the Northern Hemisphere, is as crisp as an old chip in a hot oven, thanks to the driest July ever recorded. All of Wales, and most of England is officially in drought.
There seems no end in sight – British groundwater and river reserves are so depleted the drought will last into 2027 unless the English winter is twice as wet as it normally is. If it does rain heavily (as predicted by one of the most extreme El Niño events ever recorded), parched soils will bring deadly flash floods, as bone dry soil isn’t very absorbent.
Africa, Asia and North America have experienced their warmest July on record, and so have global sea surfaces, according to data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the European Copernicus Programme and the World Meteorological Organization.
As fires rage across Europe, conservatives are finally questioning their old dogma – even in a bastion of dogged denial like The Telegraph newspaper, whose subscribers are used to being told that climate change is a hoax.
They must have spat out their single-origin oolong while reading Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley’s piece in late July:
“Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe are the way we live now… Global warming – yes, we can call it that – is killing things conservatives claim to love. Farming. Rural tradition. Millions of French chickens, the poor things practically boiled alive. Europe is thought to have lost around 10 million tons of forecast grain production last month, which might mean greater imports and higher prices. Capitalism does not thrive in an apocalypse.”
Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called the column ‘strikingly sane’, although Stanley seemed more interested in capitalism and chickens than human beings – who are dying in large numbers. A few days ago, the news agency AFP put the toll at 33,000 “excess deaths, or deaths directly linked to the heat” across Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – just eight countries.
The heatwaves are killing people.
Meanwhile, developing countries have proven oddly resistant to crusading Telegraph headlines like “We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero”, or “Climate change catastrophism is a Leftist weapon to destroy capitalism”. As Rusbridger points out, places like Kenya, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines “can’t get to net zero fast enough”.
Nearly all of Kenya’s electricity comes from renewable energy sources. Pakistan is in the midst of a massive uptake in solar power, thanks to Putin, Trump, corrupt power companies and cheap Chinese rooftop solar panels.
On roofs and kitchens across the world, clean energy has literally nothing to do with ideology. It is popular because it is cheap and reliable.
It represents the future, to everyone except the coalition government of New Zealand, who prefer to spend our money on responding to climate disasters rather than doing anything about future risk.
Sir Brian Hoskins, an 81-year-old meteorologist and climatologist based at the Imperial College, London, has spent his life studying the climate. Not being a Times reader, I have Rusbridger to thank for sharing his ‘Letter to the Editor’: “Net zero,” writes Hoskins, “is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics. To halt warming, net greenhouse gas emissions must stop. Pretending we can safely slow the transition ignores the certainty of escalating climate costs, which will fall most heavily on vulnerable, lower-income households.”
Many of them, it turns out, are perfectly aware of this. Which begs the question – if the enlightened citizens of Lahore can have solar panels on their roofs, why can’t we?
• Jenny Nicholls
