The “red alerts” issued by the Meteorological Office are rare, serious, and speak just as much to the climate crisis facing planet Earth as they do to the immediate risks to human health in Britain.
Perhaps it is the heat making the more vocal climate-change deniers dismiss the sweltering evidence before them, but against the backdrop of these record-breaking temperatures, their claims that “it’s just weather” appear in the worst of taste, and dangerous with it.
Temperatures approaching 40C in June are not normal. But they are increasingly frequent. So are extraordinarily wet winters. The reality of climate change from global warming, and the danger that it will accelerate into an unpredictable and catastrophic cycle by the middle of the century, should be treated with the urgency the moment demands.
In countries such as Britain, built on the perfectly natural presumption of a permanently temperate climate, there is an all too obvious need to increase resilience, from railway tracks to the foundations of buildings and flood defences.
A few years ago, this position was common ground. During his recent, almost valedictory appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer bemoaned the loss of national purpose in restraining greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing the target of a net zero UK economy by 2050. After all, for all his fatal flaws, Boris Johnson accepted the science and the need for action at successive Cop summits, and it was Theresa May who put the net zero target into law.
Now Kemi Badenoch calls herself a “net zero sceptic” – rather too close to flat-Earthism for a serious politician. Still worse is the fracturing of the international consensus by an anti-science elite: Donald Trump’s inexplicable insistence that climate change is a “hoax” will be his true legacy to future generations.
Under the pressure of the cost of living crisis, strained public finances, and the frankly malign influence of the fossil-fuel lobby on British politics, the public and politicians alike have found more immediate, quotidian matters to fret about. This approach is perfectly understandable, but deeply flawed. Climate change, with its costly consequences for every nation and every human being, is an inconvenient truth, and an issue that should transcend all others.
In fact, humanity cannot afford to ignore the fact that renewable sources – alongside a role for nuclear power – can produce cheap, plentiful and clean energy. They will have to be adopted in any case, because fossil fuels are a finite resource, carry unacceptable geopolitical risks, and will so alter life on Earth as to render it almost unrecognisable, just as the weather is now. The drive to net zero is not a burden or an obstacle to higher standards of living, but the way to achieve hitherto unknown prosperity – especially if the voracious appetite for energy of the AI data centres can be satisfied without engendering irreversible climate change.
Paying for the massive investment in green power has always been the issue, but rarely is it set against the cost of doing nothing – crop failure, buildings collapsing from subsidence, increased incidence of earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, widespread disruption to transport and industry, and the flows of humans that will inevitably follow from the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and water shortages across the equatorial regions.
What would the loss of pollinating insects and the rainforests do to our way of life? We know that it would not be cheap, or even possible, to fix.
Even if it is practically impossible to reverse climate change, we can still limit it. Some imaginative solutions will need to be found. How, for example, to discourage people from installing central heating systems – the wrong kind of resilience when powered in part by burning natural gas, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Could we reform school term times, which still revolve around the long-gone need to get the harvest in? Are there novel ways to bolster flood defences, both at the riverside and at the coast? Can we mandate the installation of new railway tracks that are less susceptible to buckling? What can the insurance sector do to help people affected by subsidence – especially as the UK has such an old housing stock? Must we shut motorways for hours after an accident, when people then have little access to water and shade?
The prime minister is right to have set up Cobra meetings to monitor the situation, but he, or more likely his successor, should also work on the ways in which we can protect lives – and the economy – from a hotter, damper future. And of course, the drive for net zero has to go on, because doing nothing cannot be an option.
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