End of April, so here in the Northern Hemisphere we’re truly into Spring. Yesterday in London we had clear blue skies and temperatures in the high teens (centigrade, that is. For any of you Fahrenheit people, that’s the mid- 60s). We’re lucky to live in a very green part of town, so everywhere you look there is cherry and apple blossom, and earlier in the month magnolias brightened up the dreary days. We were promised even higher temperatures today with even more blue sky, but as so often in the UK, it’s cooler and greyer than predicted.
The British are often mocked for their preoccupation with weather, but for such a small country it varies widely from top to bottom and right to left so there’s always something to talk about. In recent years, though, we’ve been talking more about heatwaves, floods, storms and droughts. We’ve even had (relatively small) wildfires, but all in all, we still have it easy compared to other countries. About eight or nine years ago, I remember meeting a middle-aged American couple and we fell to talking about weather (we British love dragging others into weather-talk). They came from serious farming country in the mid-West and told us that in all their years, they’d never known such terrible droughts. And it was getting hotter every summer, they added. Used to be unbearably hot only in July and August. Now it was June to late September.
Not long after that, I had a similar conversation with a Norwegian from North Norway, where summer usually consists of unzipping your waterproof for an hour or two. The previous summer, he told us, the temperature had reached an unprecedented 18 degrees (the mid-60s, Fahrenheit people). Everyone dug out the one t-shirt they possessed and rolled up their jeans before throwing themselves in lakes to cool down.
Two anecdotes do not make great evidence, but global warming, as it used to be called, was already featuring more and more in the news. According to reports, we had twenty to thirty years before the situation became critical. Close enough to worry about but not close enough to lose sleep over. Targets were set, accords were reached, carbon was offset, we would be all right. Probably.
Now climate change (or as some say we should call it, climate emergency) is hitting almost everyone on the planet and we may be at one minute to midnight or even closer. You’ve heard it before but it’s worth repeating, because for all the protests, reports, personal and government initiatives, no one is doing enough fast enough. For all the nice, reasonable people who are doing their hardest to turn the ship around, there are other less nice, less reasonable people who pay lip service to halting climate change or just don’t care about what happens to others as long their lifestyles aren’t affected
Put simply, I don’t care whether it’s a manmade crisis or a natural cycle that rolls round every however many thousand years. I just want the endless playground brawls between big bullies to stop so we can work together to keep this planet habitable.
Instead of cats, you’ll have noticed that I’ve punctuated this newsletter with temperature charts for a bunch of major cities over the last 40 or so years. I can’t make sense of 2 and 3 degree global rises that may or may not signify irreversible climate change, but these say something to me and I hope they do to you.
And nobody’s exempt. Nobody
(These charts all come from meteoblue climate change.)
Universe to Earthlings: Awaken, or Die.