“Should we talk about the weather?” mused the popular beat combo outfit R.E.M. in their pop song Pop Song ’89, before offering an alternative conversation piece: “Should we talk about the government?” I’ll go for the weather, thank you very much, because our politics is at least theoretically in recess at the moment and for people throughout the world the weather has gone mad.
One word used to describe the weather in the UK is changeable, which is another way of saying wet or even shit. The British summer was, for most of my life, a summer I tried to escape from. From miserable damp, caravan holidays as a child in Dorset – we never, once, made it to the beach – to miserable, damp holiday cottages in Cornwall with our young children, sheltering from the rain and wind, it did not take much to persuade us that once we could afford holidays in the sun in places like Greece and Spain, we would book them. And so we did.
Confined to summer holidays, our weeks in Greece took place in July and August and of course it was hot. Once, and only once back in 2007, the thermometers in Corfu briefly showed 40c and it was unbearable. How relieved we were when the heatwave subsided back to a more modest 30c to 35c? Now our children have grown up, at least in years, we are able to holiday outside of July and August. If we were still tied to July and August for foreign holidays, we’d think twice about it because the occasional excessively high temperatures are becoming the norm.
During the long, dry, sunny spring, my partner and I discussed the forthcoming summer, knowing that June and the early part of July would be sunny and warm but as soon as the school holidays arrived, Britain’s weather would become changeable again. But this year, it didn’t.
We are nearing the end of summer now – 31st August is the last day of the meteorological summer – but the long, hot, dry summer shows no sign of cooling down. Yesterday, we sweltered in the low 30s celsius, today is a mid 20s blip but by the weekend the hot stuff will be back. And, for once in my life, I am not looking forward to it.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the hot, sunny days, but I also like our green and pleasant land and much of our green and pleasant land isn’t green anymore. the land is parched and deathly in places, some rivers are running dry, some have completely dried up already. Looking at our garden, beautifully curated by my partner, I see the huge cracks in the soil. Even the little rain we do get washes away as quickly as it comes. This can’t go on forever, can it?
It won’t go on forever and soon enough we will be bemoaning the endless weather that will likely visit us in the autumn, doubtless causing record rainfall and floods. Basically, from one extreme to another. And that, dear reader, is the future: extreme weather.
The extreme weather is because of the fact of climate change. No credible scientist denies that climate change is responsible for the changes to our weather and the extremes that are accompanying it. Indeed, no credible scientist denies that humans are responsible for climate change. Sure, there are climate change deniers who happen to also be anti-vaxxers, 9/11 ‘truthers’, chem trail believers, Donald Trump supporters; basically the wingnut fringes of politics. The rest of us, even if we don’t fully understand the intricacies of the science, still believe the experts who do.
Knowing that the climate is changing, that today’s extremes are tomorrow’s norms, what can we do? We can do our little bit on recycling, we can drive low emission vehicles rather than high polluting gas guzzlers – we can do all manner of things and together we can make a difference. And I like to make a difference, even when I look around the streets in my local area where the black bins are overflowing with waste set for landfill, where people drive giant RVs at huge cost to the environment; where many people all around the world think that climate change is something someone else will have to deal with.
People enjoying this year’s holidays in the UK – these are not staycations, which mean literally staying at home – will be loving the sun while wading through the water in our heavily polluted seas and rivers. Why, they might wonder, can’t it be like this every year, just like it is in Spain and Greece and Portugal and France? Maybe it will be and then we to will suffer from the disastrous fires sweeping across Europe, disastrous fires that were once rare but now are part of the new normal summer.
It’s entirely reasonable to suggest that by September you may find me complaining about the terrible cold, rainy weather that has returned with a vengeance, turning parched fields into a quagmire, flooding people’s homes and doubtless bringing about human tragedies.
We do need to talk about the weather. The fact that I am longing for changeable weather to bring back the green and restore our parched landscapes is, for me, unheard of. It has been a great spring and summer and I have enjoyed it to the full but at the back of my mind, I am fearful. Sometimes it feels like the world is on fire and that’s because some of it literally is. We’re in a crisis of our own making and just by pretending it might go away won’t do anything to stop it. I’m afraid that’s exactly what we are doing, though.
