This summer could be the hottest, driest and deadliest in English history. Successive heatwaves have so far claimed almost 3,000 lives. Nearly three-quarters of England and all of Wales is in drought, while key reservoirs are parched.
Across this brown and stickily unpleasant land, from Grimsby down to St Ives, hosepipe bans are in force, while music festivals are staged not on green fields but in giant dust bowls. I asked a leading climate scientist. So far, so soothingly familiar – only the UK had gone from its usual green and jaunty yellow to a deep, bloody red.
Cambridge was stamped with 40C, while Somerset and Dorset were up at 45C. This is the near-future that awaits you and me, our children and grandchildren. Just two decades away, the weather forecaster urged us to block out the sun and stay indoors.
Except there will not be as much fluid to drink. Britain is world-renowned for its soft steady drizzle, but over the next couple of decades, our summers will turn arid while winters are more likely to bring a regular deluge of rain, breaking our riverbanks and flooding our homes. Indeed, El Niño means this winter is likely to be especially bad – up there with Storm Desmond, believed Prof Fowler, the cyclone that in December 2015 shut down railway lines and plunged more than 60,000 homes in the north of England into darkness with no power.
Pleading for water half the year, then terrified of its power the other half. This is not “climate change” as it used to be shown on official graphs, running on smooth lines pointing upwards; this is breakdown. Not that you’d know it from our politicians.
This week, Nigel Farage’s useful idiot, Richard Tice, urged us to stop moaning and down some English sparkling. Our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is strikingly eloquent on many subjects, but keeps stumm on the climate crisis, apart from his promises to be “pragmatic” on fossil fuels. Elsewhere, the columnists dust off their standby paragraphs fulminating about the Englishman’s right to wash his own SUV, and the public information ads chide us to turn off taps, as if more mindful toothbrushing is a climate-adaptation strategy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
