There is, however, one rather important fly in the ointment. It hasn’t just been hot in Yorkshire and the extent of the extreme weather patterns seems to go way beyond the central predictions of slow and gradual warming of the climate over the next decades.
There have been record temperatures and huge forest fires in Portugal. That ought to be a once in a generation event. It has been happening virtually every summer there and the land is burning up. The same thing is happening a thousand or so miles away in Greece. Sweden has had a heatwave. The whole of Europe has been burning up or suffering from sudden flash floods.
That could of course be just one of those natural weather variations that happens as a result of complex climatic processes that will always produce extremes somewhere in the world at any given time. Except that the problem hasn’t been restricted to the whole of Europe. The highest temperature ever was recorded in Japan this summer. California has, yet again, been experiencing huge forest fires and much of Australia is back to extremes of drought. More importantly the data for the sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere puts us on track for it to be either the lowest ever recorded or the second lowest.
Which leads to the obvious question. What does it take to convince some people? If this doesn’t worry the sceptics then what will? There is no day on which climate change will become so obvious that those with a vested interest in ignoring it are going to put their hands up and say: “OK, we got it wrong, we really need to start taking this seriously.” There is never going to be a single morning when we wake up and the front page of every newspaper and the main item on world news channels and websites is that today we got definitive proof that global climate change has gone too far too fast and we’re all in deep deep trouble. What we are going to get is the steady accumulation of scientific evidence.
Most careful scientists value their reputations and don’t want to over exaggerate predictions they make on the basis of complex data. So there is a slight bias towards cautious estimates. Most careless politicians value short term popularity and have a strong bias towards not telling people unpleasant truths if they can be put off until later. Those politicians don’t always like receiving or funding research that makes their lives harder. That is why Donald Trump has cancelled every bit of funding or objective reporting of climate change science that he can find. He isn’t alone in not wanting to hear what he doesn’t find convenient. There is therefore a real risk that the objective scientific reports are too cautious and this strange summer may not be one of those occasional outlier years that will always happen but actually is the summer when we should have spotted the bleeding obvious when it is staring us in the face. We aren’t just running out of time to act. We may well be out of time and now need to act radically to stave off and ameliorate problems.
The weird thing is that the changes we need to make are now pretty clear and evident and much of the technology we need is either ready and waiting and affordable or likely to become so very quickly once the right decisions are made. Since those technologies are going to have to be adopted sooner or later across the whole planet it is also very much in the national interest of each country to be at the leading edge of the changes. If only for the narrow economic reason that it is usually better to be good at the next wave of technology than to have a lot of expertise and equipment geared up to doing things in an old fashioned way and watching business slowly fade away as people switch to new products and suppliers.
I therefore think that any responsible politician, economist or environmentalist should be putting every effort into getting some sensible future orientated policies passed. Everyone’s list will vary but my favourite examples would include:
- Reduce energy usage per person, per home and per business by increasing the incentives to insulate homes, use graphene heaters, and decorate walls with heat retaining materials. Invest in research in this area and in bringing that research to market.
- Create higher incentives to use public transport and to adopt electric vehicles. Increase taxes on older vehicles. Rapidly build a network of charging points by insisting that every new or modified property must include charging points and requiring every supermarket car park to provide them.
- Invest in energy storage devices including batteries and build the capacity to deal with fluctuations in use and production of energy in any one location. Use the money earmarked for wasteful vanity projects like Hinkley Point to achieve this.
- Financially support investment projects which enable businesses to produce and sell new lower energy use plastic free products
- Generate more energy locally by increasing support to homes and businesses to install power generating and power storing facilities and insisting that every new home and business must produce more electricity than it will use.
- Support supermarkets and product producers to reduce waste and support local authorities to increase recycling and reuse of waste.
- Incentivise useful tree planting and tax harmful tree felling.
- Focus the foreign aid budget on supporting nations with forest land to help their farmers to produce food whilst retaining tree cover.
- Increase taxes on fossil fuel production, transport and use.
- Ban fracking
The great worry is the length of time it takes to change production and consumption and the level of conscious reaction to change that exists. Donald Trump isn’t just a climate change sceptic. He actively hates spending any money or passing any policies that do anything to prevent change. Indeed, it is worse than that. He knows that he can win votes by telling people there is no problem, they need to do nothing and that these crazy liberals want to take away their cars and bikes and make them all eat tofu. The crazy result is that you have people in New Orleans who had their homes flooded and their city damaged by extreme climate events who will happily vote for Donald Trump because he pretends to like motor bike gangs.
Historically this kind of thing is to be expected. The largest and the fiercest reaction against change usually takes place at exactly the moment when one era of technology is obviously starting to pass away and the next has just started to scare some people. In the past the outcome of that has been that the nation that dug its heels in and refused to adapt to the future entered a long relative decline. Look at China during the industrial revolution in Britain for example.
Right now we no longer have any luxury of time or the ability to put off acting on our problems whilst we fight off reacton. We need radically different policies and we need them quickly. Or this summer of fires and melting ice is not going to be one rare extreme event but mild by comparison with the future.