Thoughts on the UK's Hottest Ever Day

 

19th July 2022

I started typing this on the hottest UK day of all time (again!) and with temperatures topping 40 degrees centigrade for the first time ever recorded, surely any remaining climate change skeptics here must now be convinced of the science. It is true that you cannot attribute any single weather event purely to climate change but the trend is obvious. Seven of the top ten hottest UK temperatures have been since the year 2000 and only one was pre-1990. And although we are an island, when it comes to higher temperatures we are certainly not unique.

I think it will prove to be the world's biggest travesty that our leaders listened to fat cats instead of scientists for about forty years, and now we are beginning to reap the results. Invading other countries and swelling the pockets of the rich seemed far more important than ensuring a stable future for our descendants. Believe the science; this is just the beginning.

It's rare that I recommend a book that wasn't written by myself or my mother, but I recommend 'Our Future Earth' by Curt Stager for a long-term non-sensationalist view on the subject. According to the book, we have already prevented the next ice age which is due in about 50,000 years time. Yes, this is the kind of timescale involved when it comes to releasing millions of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere over a few centuries.

Quite how uncomfortable we will make life for our immediate descendants relies on how quickly we can change to non-carbon forms of energy. In the mid-2010s we reached levels of atmospheric carbon that have not been around for 16 million years (according to YaleEnvironment360). Humans have simply never experienced what we are unleashing before, so it's a kind of experiment that we have all unwittingly entered and cannot bail out of. The delayed climatic response to what we are doing has been perhaps the biggest obstacle to human understanding of this issue.

What is particularly concerning is that the media hardly ever talks about what the world will be like after the year 2100, but there are teenagers now who will be around to experience this legacy. Why do we show so much concern for their school grades and the possibility of them earning well but give so little thought to the risks posed to their wellbeing by extreme weather, rising tides and war? Yes 'war,' because if we do not start taking a global attitude to global problems there will be fighting for the remaining fertile land and resources. People in my little corner of England seem to get incredibly steamed up about immigration, but has nobody considered hundreds of millions of displaced people that will be fleeing starvation and land destruction in the future? If they're that concerned about immigration they should be really concerned about climate change.

Another thing that truly scared me as a teenager was learning about the human population explosion in my geography lessons, being introduced to the theories of Malthus, which state that if human population increases beyond a certain threshold it will be reduced by war, famine and disease. Human population has seen accelerated growth due to the improvements brought about by the industrial revolution, but developing countries have yet to go through this stage of development which eventually results in a more stable population. Unromantic though it may seem, if there is little risk of you outliving your own children and there is a 'safety net' in old age (pensions), meaning that your offspring will not have to look after you, there is no need to have quite so many of those screaming bundles of joy. Britain went through the same process around a century ago, and as you'll observe families are now generally 'twos' rather than 'tens.'

To my mind, climate change is just another manifestation of the grim theory of Malthus. We cannot blame other countries for wanting to live the lifestyles that we have, but we have hardly led the way so far when it comes to switching to greener alternatives. In my opinion we should have got the ball rolling forty years ago when the seriousness of this issue first became obvious.

Instead we listened to people like the 'comedic' attention seeker, Jeremy Clarkson, and the ultra-rich who argued that if we let them do whatever they like to make money, it will eventually trickle down to all of us. Thus, we listened to George W. Bush and Donald Trump instead of scientists, and here in the 2022 'cost of living' crisis, I can say that I've seen more 'trickle' in the Sahara Desert!

Over the last twenty years I have tried to raise awareness of the seriousness of climate change in my own small way. I'm not exactly Greta Thunberg, but pretty much all of my books, fact or fiction, contain some reference to it. In my novel, 'The Nightshade Project,' averting the potential suffering that it will cause is in fact a dominant theme. I have also penned a few songs on the subject, most notably 'Hot Air' (originally recorded by Adam Colton and Teresa Colton in 2006). 

However, I'm not here to blow my own trumpet, but more to express disappointment in those who should know better- our leaders and those with genuine influence, courtesy of their massive bank accounts. These influencers have been so slow to get with the programme. Instead they muddied the waters of science to justify 'business as usual.' There was even an advert paid for by oil lobbyists implying that CO2 is green. If they really love carbon so much, why don't they go and work in a pencil factory? (Graphite, anyone?)

Instead of the world's great minds applying themselves to this pressing issue in 2022 we've seen an ego-based war started by a crazy old man who seems to want to bludgeon his name into history (classic narcissism). Think of all the money and resources that are now having to be diverted into fighting one another because of one man's ego, rather than being used to get to grips with humanity's most pressing issue.

Einstein is reputed to have said that 'insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.' That seems to be exactly what the human race has been doing collectively for decades. Put the dolphins in charge! (If there are any left, that is.)