For once, Ed Miliband is right about something: the British way of life is under threat. But it is not for the reasons he claims. Our way of life is under threat because high energy prices are leading to Britain’s rapid deindustrialisation. Once a proud and wealthy industrial nation, we are becoming an impoverished country ever more reliant on importing stuff that we used to make ourselves.
Miliband, by contrast, claims that our way of life is being ruined by a changing climate. Today he will make a statement to the House of Commons revealing the contents of the latest annual ‘State of the Climate’ report by the Met Office and Royal Meteorological Society – a statement he describes as an ‘exercise in radical truth-telling’.
Sea level rise remains the most serious problem, climate-wise, for Britain
To save you the bother of having to listen to Miliband, I have read the report for you. There is something a little unsatisfactory about the report this year, as in every year, because it compares data from the past decade with data from the reference period 1961-1990. To compare a ten-year period with a 30 year period should set alarm bells ringing, especially when climate is generally defined as what happens over a 30 year period. Data from a ten-year period is inevitably going to be more volatile than from a 30 year one, as it is going to be more affected by extreme, singular events.
But with that in mind, the report states the following. The average temperature across Britain was 1.24 Celsius higher during the decade between 2015 and 2024 than it was between 1961 and 1990. The number of days with temperatures exceeding 10 Celsius over the 1961-90 average has quadrupled. There has been a corresponding fall in the number of cold days, with the coldest day of the year on average now 1.9 Celsius higher than during 1961-90.
Interestingly, however, the authors of the report do not flag this up in the Executive Summary (i.e. the bit which most people will limit themselves to reading). Given, however, that cold weather is associated with around ten times as many excess deaths as hot weather, this is a very big deal which deserves greater attention than it tends to get. The Met Office might also like to explain why this report is published in July, with an unnerving tendency for its release to coincide with hot weather.
As for rainfall, in 2015-24 we received, on average, 10 per cent more of it per year than we did in 1961-90, with almost all that rise in the winter half of the year. There has been a ‘slight increase’ in heavy rainfall in recent decades (in contrast to those who assert that every flood is caused or has been made worse by climate change). Again in contrast to popular imagination, Britain is becoming less stormy, with a downward trend in average wind speeds and extreme wind speeds. This is good news from the point of view of avoided wind damage, but it is somewhat inconvenient for Miliband’s strategy of trying to power Britain’s electricity grid with very high levels of wind energy.
Also of interest, Britain is becoming a little sunnier – which may well bed down to less air pollution. Sea levels have risen by 19.5 cm since 1901, with two-thirds of that occurring in the past three decades. However, the report does question the measured 13.5 cm increase over the past 32 years, as it is larger than the global trend. It describes the data as ‘uncertain’.
Sea level rise remains the most serious problem, climate-wise, for Britain. But it does also pose the question: why isn’t the government doing more about it? Rather than beef up our coastal defences, we have developed a defeatist approach over the past three decades in which a policy of ‘managed retreat’ is favoured over the construction of new sea defences. It has meant communities atop crumbling cliffs in the East of England being allowed to fall into the sea rather than be defended by sea walls as they would have in the past. If the Netherlands adopted the same attitude towards coastal defence as Britain, they would have to abandon large swathes of their country, a quarter of which lies below sea level.
But don’t expect Miliband to dwell on this today in his ‘radical truth telling’. Instead, he will tell us that it is imperative we build even more wind turbines – to splutter in Britain’s increasingly calm air.
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