floods – Emotional Climate

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.08.26), kinda repeating myself. So much evidence of climate change, so little protection for the people. It is difficult to focus on any key link that can pull the movement forward and back into action, yesterday heat, tomorrow floods, January freeze…Britain, shielded by the “Gulf Stream”, has infrastructure only resilient to weather between +5C and +25C. We are woefully ill-equipped for anything outside that, including the extreme weight of rain modelled and expected this winter. Pressure has be brought to bear on government for massive investment in both adaptation and mitigation – but the opposite is happening: more oil and gas extraction. A declaration that the bulk of working people are expendable. Protest!

The unedited version below, or spread the pic for the published article.

The fires are still not out yet already we are looking forward to Autumn floods. When the rains come, the hardened and baked soil will reject the drenching, water left standing on the surface and fast-flowing downhill. There shall be floods.

Five heatwaves on, Summer not yet finished, the section of the international culture-wars concerned with Climate Change has projected a grotesque level of disinformation. Despite all the evidence – record temperatures rising year-on-year; dramatic sea temperatures rise off-the-charts; acceleration of glacial melt and antarctic ice collapse the size of whole nations; a reverse of the decline in fossil fuel emissions – the deniers persist in negating the climate emergency.

Tory Leader, Badenoch, pledges to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, which includes the target for net zero emissions by 2050, representing a U-turn from her party’s previous commitments to climate action. This is in response to Farage’s rants about “woke Britain” needing to embrace higher temperatures, pledging to scrap “net zero” to cut energy bills and replacing it with a focus on energy security and expanding oil and gas extraction, the precise opposite of what is needed.

The British Psychological Society has researched this media coverage, discovering one-third of the published heatwave images offered positive “fun in the sun” narratives. Our newspapers have overwhelmingly reflected the right-wing climate sceptics. Approximately 80% of UK media coverage of this Summer’s heatwaves has depicted people enjoying the weather, often overlooking the serious risks associated with extreme heat. It is a form of climate denial, a default propaganda downplaying the impact, the threats and the suffering. We must be “woke” to worry.

Pictures of burning houses have a commentary the omits to explore the lack of insurance coverage or government assistance. Film of exhausted fire fighters says nothing of the 30% cuts to this emergency service over the past 12 years which has left sparse protection despite heroic efforts. Coverage of wildfires barely mention not only the wildlife losses but the destruction of the local ecology. The loss of insect and plantlife would take 15-20 years to replace if, that is, there was a return to normal conditions. But there won’t be.

These images have a serious impact on how we understand and think about climate change. They’re shared and amplified by the conspiracy theorists and far-Right Climate deniers across all social media to glorify our descent towards catastrophe. And the broadcast “positive spin” is sponsored by the fossil fuel companies seeking to maintain their industry’s prestige and profits.

Such media-wide positive spin on this immediate and growing threat to life has had an impact. The question is asked, “where have all the climate protesters gone” at a time of the most obvious climate crisis? Draconian laws implemented against protesters from Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, and Extinction Rebellion has jailed or muzzled most of the most able activists. Corporate control of mass media has muffled the rest of us. And it has been too hot to run about!

Climate Change is no “Act of God”. The extra weather is a result of the accumulation of gases in the atmosphere that prevent the escape of excess heat from the planet. These gases are created by humans burning fossil fuels. Global heating emissions are rising again across the Earth’s North West, a direct result of the success of oil and gas corporations and their paid-for politicians to downplay and obfuscate the scale of destruction they are wreaking.

The crossing of the 1.5C global temperature increase means more heating is built-in. Geographic Europe is the fastest heating continent. Britains will increasingly suffer. The 3,000+ excess deaths from this summers heatwaves, reported by the Met Office, are a symbolic and very partial example of the disruption to come. This year’s harvest failures, food shortages and food price-hikes will be replicated and worsened next year.

We need emergency mitigation and adaptation in equal measure. For this to happen we need to shout out with all our might against the prevaricators, the distractors, the fossil fuel spinners and liars. This is a climate emergency, an existential crisis, the greatest threat to humanity across all our history according to the scientific consensus.

Amidst all this, the legal case for opening of the new Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw gas field in UK waters is still being pursued by the government. Whilst the public consultation closed yesterday, the corporate pressure continues. We must protest!

I started this blog in 2019 with a first short entry entitled “Why Am I Emotional?” I’m more emotional now. Huge swathes of Europe on fire, as predicted, and floods elsewhere. I was engaged with campaigns for climate action in the 1990’s advised by Jonathan Neale, convinced of the emergency by South American climate scientists offering mentorship at the World Social Forum, and educated by experts through the Campaign against Climate Change, helping with the Climate Jobs manifesto and mass engagement through the trade union movement. The level of climate denial, sponsored and funded by the billionaire oil and gas corporations, has effectively dwarfed all our efforts. Perhaps now, as the world burns – as predicted by Greta Thunberg back in 2019 – the penny has dropped and the climate emergency can be acted upon. But it doesn’t look that way.

Here’s my first blog entry, fyi:

6th September 2019

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia.

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs.

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply.

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.

Emotional Climate

Day-to-day reflections of the climate catastrophe

Tag: floods

Climate Collapse is the Biggest Threat to Humanity – Where’s the Protests?

Why Am I Emotional?