A month's rain fell in a day last week in parts of Britain. There were 140 flood warnings in the north of England, rain forcing the evacuation of Croston and Darwen in Lancashire; elsewhere, it washed out the Isle of Wight festival.
Indeed, rainfall over the last three months has broken new records – following two years in which less rain had fallen than at any time since the 1920s.
This is part of a wider pattern. It is not just that world temperatures are on average steadily rising, the weather everywhere is becoming more extreme.
Eleven of the last 12 years have been the hottest on record, and the growing volatility in our weather is linked to global warming.
As the earth warms, the relationships between ocean currents, the ice caps, atmospheric pressure and the jet stream become more turbulent, and the weather turns more unpredictable.
Twenty years ago these trends, already visible but less marked, prompted the first earth summit in Rio.
The second one closed on Friday night with a political declaration as long as it was vapid. There were plenty of warm words and reaffirmations of intent – but nothing that might address the intense pressure on the natural environment.
There was, for example, no deterrent to the burning of fossil fuels or incentive to make renewable ones more economically attractive.
Targets for sustainable development? Forget them. And so it went on — a non-event that hardly got reported. There was the usual cast of suspects.
China and India were determined that action on carbon emissions must be undertaken by the west and not by them, so creating political deadlock.
American oil, car and airline companies lobby intensely to stop any tax being levied on oil and gas, while global banks lobby no less furiously against a financial transactions tax whose proceeds might be used to alleviate the impact of climate change on those countries and regions most badly affected – usually the very poorest.
Climate change is not just about life on earth tomorrow: it is about justice today. But lobbying and political intransigence are much easier to achieve when there is no intellectual consensus – and one of the dramatic changes since 1992 is the worldwide growth of climate change scepticism.
The science is allegedly unconvincing. The smart sceptics, such as Lord Lawson, do not doubt that world temperatures are rising, but they dispute whether it is human activity that is causing it. The weather is phenomenally complex and poorly understood, they argue.
Adaptation to rising temperatures makes sense – not mounting massive governmental and intergovernmental initiatives dramatically to lower carbon emissions to save future generations from problems that probably will, they argue, never happen.
These propositions are, to say the least, contentious. Almost everybody in the scientific world accepts the evidence that the record rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is associated with rising global temperatures. But the evidence is less important than how today's media works.
It likes a spat: the idiosyncratic brave climate change dissenter is pitched as the David against the Goliath of established opinion. Even more telling is the ideological imperative.
Climate change sceptics, most vividly in the US where it has become a basic credo of the modern Republican party, are sceptics because to accept the case is to accept the need to do something collectively and internationally that must involve government. But government is bad. It is inefficient, obstructs enterprise, inhibits freedom, regulates and taxes.
Climate change activists want carbon taxes and to set targets for efficient resource use; they also want regulations to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.
This is the back door through which socialism will be reinvented – and scientists have been unwittingly captured by wild leftwing environmental ginger groups.
Or, as "revealed" by the famous leaked emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia, they are conspiring to delude the public like latterday Bolsheviks.
Climate change scepticism has become the new common sense – the backdrop against which it is so much easier to obstruct any action than it was at the time of the first summit in 1992.
The ideology driving the sceptics is most obvious in the exchanges over the impact on future generations. US Tea Party activists and their bombastic British representative, Niall Ferguson – now delivering the Reith lectures – like to terrify their audiences with how much public debt today's generation is leaving its children. Yet the same argument is not applied to the planet.
At the end of his first lecture Professor Ferguson was asked if he applied the same logic on future generations to climate change: he was flummoxed, and dodged the question.
He was right to be embarrassed. Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe.
Economists use what is called a discount rate to compare income and welfare in the future with income and welfare today. If we forgo just a little welfare today through burning less fossil fuel, even applying a modest discount rate, we can guarantee that there will be no catastrophic loss of welfare in 2050.
This is exactly the same argument that Ferguson, Osborne et al use in reverse when asking us to accept austerity today for the joy of being free of public debt in decades to come.
But it is not OK to use it for climate change. The reason is not hard to see: one implies rolling back the state; the other using it.
This is not just inconsistent: it is wrong, and foretells an intellectual crisis for the right very similar to the one through which the left has lived. For the past 30 years collective action to achieve common goals has been successfully rubbished as ineffective.
The left's world view has had be reinvented – necessitated by lived experience. Capitalism is not going away: the task is to reform it deploying a more agile, intelligent state. Now it is the right's turn. There is climate change.
No gardener, farmer, sailor, festival-goer or refugee from floods doubts it – let alone the scientific community.
This requires a response from the state that will include taxation and regulation, however much Tea Party activists, Niall Ferguson and Lord Lawson may deplore it. Reality put the left on the defensive for a generation before it came to its senses.
The same is about to happen to the right. Lived experience is about to show how wrong it is – and Britain and the world cannot afford the mistake.
guardian.co.uk
Indeed, rainfall over the last three months has broken new records – following two years in which less rain had fallen than at any time since the 1920s.
This is part of a wider pattern. It is not just that world temperatures are on average steadily rising, the weather everywhere is becoming more extreme.
Eleven of the last 12 years have been the hottest on record, and the growing volatility in our weather is linked to global warming.
As the earth warms, the relationships between ocean currents, the ice caps, atmospheric pressure and the jet stream become more turbulent, and the weather turns more unpredictable.
Twenty years ago these trends, already visible but less marked, prompted the first earth summit in Rio.
The second one closed on Friday night with a political declaration as long as it was vapid. There were plenty of warm words and reaffirmations of intent – but nothing that might address the intense pressure on the natural environment.
There was, for example, no deterrent to the burning of fossil fuels or incentive to make renewable ones more economically attractive.
Targets for sustainable development? Forget them. And so it went on — a non-event that hardly got reported. There was the usual cast of suspects.
China and India were determined that action on carbon emissions must be undertaken by the west and not by them, so creating political deadlock.
American oil, car and airline companies lobby intensely to stop any tax being levied on oil and gas, while global banks lobby no less furiously against a financial transactions tax whose proceeds might be used to alleviate the impact of climate change on those countries and regions most badly affected – usually the very poorest.
Climate change is not just about life on earth tomorrow: it is about justice today. But lobbying and political intransigence are much easier to achieve when there is no intellectual consensus – and one of the dramatic changes since 1992 is the worldwide growth of climate change scepticism.
The science is allegedly unconvincing. The smart sceptics, such as Lord Lawson, do not doubt that world temperatures are rising, but they dispute whether it is human activity that is causing it. The weather is phenomenally complex and poorly understood, they argue.
Adaptation to rising temperatures makes sense – not mounting massive governmental and intergovernmental initiatives dramatically to lower carbon emissions to save future generations from problems that probably will, they argue, never happen.
These propositions are, to say the least, contentious. Almost everybody in the scientific world accepts the evidence that the record rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is associated with rising global temperatures. But the evidence is less important than how today's media works.
It likes a spat: the idiosyncratic brave climate change dissenter is pitched as the David against the Goliath of established opinion. Even more telling is the ideological imperative.
Climate change sceptics, most vividly in the US where it has become a basic credo of the modern Republican party, are sceptics because to accept the case is to accept the need to do something collectively and internationally that must involve government. But government is bad. It is inefficient, obstructs enterprise, inhibits freedom, regulates and taxes.
Climate change activists want carbon taxes and to set targets for efficient resource use; they also want regulations to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.
This is the back door through which socialism will be reinvented – and scientists have been unwittingly captured by wild leftwing environmental ginger groups.
Or, as "revealed" by the famous leaked emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia, they are conspiring to delude the public like latterday Bolsheviks.
Climate change scepticism has become the new common sense – the backdrop against which it is so much easier to obstruct any action than it was at the time of the first summit in 1992.
The ideology driving the sceptics is most obvious in the exchanges over the impact on future generations. US Tea Party activists and their bombastic British representative, Niall Ferguson – now delivering the Reith lectures – like to terrify their audiences with how much public debt today's generation is leaving its children. Yet the same argument is not applied to the planet.
At the end of his first lecture Professor Ferguson was asked if he applied the same logic on future generations to climate change: he was flummoxed, and dodged the question.
He was right to be embarrassed. Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe.
Economists use what is called a discount rate to compare income and welfare in the future with income and welfare today. If we forgo just a little welfare today through burning less fossil fuel, even applying a modest discount rate, we can guarantee that there will be no catastrophic loss of welfare in 2050.
This is exactly the same argument that Ferguson, Osborne et al use in reverse when asking us to accept austerity today for the joy of being free of public debt in decades to come.
But it is not OK to use it for climate change. The reason is not hard to see: one implies rolling back the state; the other using it.
This is not just inconsistent: it is wrong, and foretells an intellectual crisis for the right very similar to the one through which the left has lived. For the past 30 years collective action to achieve common goals has been successfully rubbished as ineffective.
The left's world view has had be reinvented – necessitated by lived experience. Capitalism is not going away: the task is to reform it deploying a more agile, intelligent state. Now it is the right's turn. There is climate change.
No gardener, farmer, sailor, festival-goer or refugee from floods doubts it – let alone the scientific community.
This requires a response from the state that will include taxation and regulation, however much Tea Party activists, Niall Ferguson and Lord Lawson may deplore it. Reality put the left on the defensive for a generation before it came to its senses.
The same is about to happen to the right. Lived experience is about to show how wrong it is – and Britain and the world cannot afford the mistake.
guardian.co.uk
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