As I sit in my wheelchair looking outside through the window at the garden, watching the rain come down during Storm Antoni , it is hard to fully understand why so many people are failing to even begin to comprehend the scale of the climate crisis and what is about to come in the days, weeks, months, years and decades ahead. The rain here is relatively hard in phases but nothing truly dramatic. The Met Office issued warnings that it would be disruptive in certain parts of the country. When I turn on the news or look at a newspaper, they are quick to bemoan the ‘wettest July on record’ in parts of the UK, forgetting June was one of the hottest, February one of the driest and the past winter one of the mildest. And thats before we go back just a few more months to the drought of last summer, not to mention current events around the world and the fact that July was the hottest global temperature recorded.
We talk about targets in 2030 and 2050 which are nicely rounded off numbers, somewhere in the future. These are human set targets and and can always altered since we have become well accustomed to targets not being met on time. A temperature rise of 1.5°C really doesn’t sound too threatening, after all living on these temperate isles with its moderate maritime climate, buffered by the Atlantic Ocean, so many people have become accustomed to complaining about the cool wet weather and then jetting off to warmer climes, to lie on a sun-bed next to a pool with temperatures far hotter than the ones here, as if it has now become some kind of human right. How could a mere 1.5° Centigrade possibly make this planet uninhabitable?
In 1856 an American scientist, inventor, and woman’s rights campaigner, Eunice Newton Foote concluded from fairly basic experiments that when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose and combined with sunlight this would then increase the atmospheric temperature and thus lead to climatic changes. This phenomenon became known as the Greenhouse Effect which recognised the role of CO2 in the same air that we breathe to keep us alive.
The thin layer of atmosphere, with its particular mix of gases, which surrounds the entire globe is a protective skin that has slowly evolved over the past four billion years and created the extraordinary abundance of life that exists, which as far as we know is unique within the entire universe. The existence of humans has only come about because of these very favourable atmospheric and climatic conditions allowing us to spread and flourish across almost all of its entire land surface in a relatively short space of time. If another species of animal had expanded on this scale and speed , say for example brown rats, we would describe this as a plague. But without these favourable conditions we would not have survived to reach where we are today.
We know, as we knew at leat 50 years ago, that the excessive burning and use of fossil fuels would dramatically change the climate. At the beginning it was called Climate Change. No big panic, no big deal. Then came Global Warming. A bit of panic, things warming up a bit. Next up Global Heating. Things getting a bit hotter. Climate Emergency appeared in an effort to ramp up the speed of more positive actions and a sense of urgency. Last week the UN Secretary General used the term Global Boiling. That should wake everybody up! After all a record global temperature had just been recorded, ocean temperatures are rising way beyond most predicted levels, there is widespread drought, wild fires are devouring forests, there are torrential rains and epic scale flooding, the poles are melting, CO2 levels at highest level for millenia, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) is rapidly going awol, and so the list could go on and on. All of this is affecting hundreds of millions of lives, often in the poorest regions where daily survival is the core of their existence, the future exists in reaching the next day.
If you had read only the headlines of a couple of the mainstream newspapers, who have been leaders in the climate denial narrative over decades, you might have thought that the light had finally begun to seep through and that they had, at last, grasped the scale of the crisis. The Daily Mail front page shouts, “How On Earth Could This Be Allowed To Happen?”. Indeed. The Daily Express trumpets, “Heads Must Roll! Just How Did This Happen?”. I would be more than happy to offer up a number of names.
But this hope is quickly extinguished, as in the bitterest of ironies, they are actually targeting a small group of well-informed and deeply concerned citizens belonging to Greenpeace. The group had knocked on the door of a mansion owned by a multi-millionaire couple, who like flying around in helicopters and private jets, and who also happen to have flown off to Santa Monica for a holiday in just another on of their properties. He happens to be our current, unelected, Prime Minister who had nonchalantly announced during the week that a shedload of new licences would be granted to “max out” and drill for fossil fuels in the North Sea. The protestors had simply erected some ladders, and four of them climbed onto the roof to unroll some black fabric to cover the front of the empty house and hold up a simple banner offering wise advice. No New Oil.
In an effort to try and find out why the climate crisis seems to have escaped the headlines of so much of the mainstream media as well as downplayed and denied in the worlds richest countries, I carried out a few Google searches searching for clues.
‘Climate Crisis’ shows 743 million results, which might seem encouraging until it is measured against the latest mobile phone, the ‘Samsung Galaxy Z’ which racks up 891 million results. This could indicate that taking selfies and social media profile trumps a boiling planet. ‘Barbie’ gives 1.86 billion results, begging any number of questions as to how a fossil fuel fabricated pink doll made in sweat shops most likely by women without a white skin in the global south, could raise so much interest when reality for most of the world’s women is grim. It drives a profound sense of depression in me.
I played football to a reasonable standard in my youth, so I still follow the sport to some extent, but it was still surprising to find ‘Messi’, the semi-retired Argentinian maestro and multi-millionaire hauling in 556 million results. Christiano Ronaldo, a Petro State puppet, pulls in just over half of this number. My team, ‘West Ham’, reel in nearly as many results as the climate crisis at 504 million which is embarrassing until I found a staggering 16 billion results for the team owned by some distinctly dodgy American billionaires, ‘Man Utd’. A search for ‘golf’ compounds my depression at 2.79 billion. Changing activities, a ‘live sex’ search shows 3.69 billion results. Hoping for some sense of proportionality and perhaps sense, ‘climate denial’ offers up 1.07 billion results, one and a half times more than the climate crisis.
It would be wrong to conclude too much from a simple ten minute Google search but at the same time it cannot be ignored. Have we reached an age in the consumer driven world where reality simply fails to attract enough attention to demand changes to an economic system driving the perpetual demand for growth and production to maximise shareholder profits and elite accumulation of that wealth. Have we become so detached and disconnected that we cannot see nor seek to understand the scale of the multiple problems that threaten our lives now, today, and not at some blurry, foggy future generational time which is simply an excuse not to get sufficiently angry and scared to act. If The Daily Mail and Daily Express think Greenpeace’s actions merit headlines, they will need rehab if the Gilets Jaune ever turn up here.
In my able-bodied existence I may have thought that I would be able to relocate to more amenable parts of the world as time went on, but as the habitable parts of the globe shrink, now I have nowhere to escape to even if I wanted to, and this is probably as fortunate a place to be as anywhere, heading into a deeply uncertain future. Whilst there is still life going on outside my window it is a reminder of just how much we stand to lose, and the BBC red sofa presenters claiming Antonio was ‘atrocious’ and ‘miserable’ really need to get outside a bit more, smell the coffee and attempt to connect their audience with at least a bit of real news. It’s not too hard to envisage a time in the not too distant future when weather like this will seem idyllic. Is this the age when we disconnect our senses from the natural living world and from our benevolent climate.
