Climate change

Montpellier Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires. It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’. Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two. Last week the

We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. It is just that one of the iconic victims doesn’t seem to be playing ball just at the moment. As recently as May, environmentalists were warning that the Great Barrier Reef, the 1,500-mile coral structure off the coast of Queensland, was being doomed by warming seas. It was reported to be suffering a ‘mass bleaching’ – where the plants which live on the reef and provide food for it die off. The blame was put on warmer seas. Worse, this was the first mass bleaching event to occur in a

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd

Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at the gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were like when they were last thick with green grass. The zebra foals are dying, the elephants are thin, while the buffalo disappeared a while back. The dry has killed quite mature trees which now shudder with the sound of termites and crash to the ground. To the north of us, horned skulls and dried carcasses

For years, environmentalists have campaigned for children to study global warming as a subject rather than simply as a part of geography. Their wish has now been granted in England with a new GCSE in natural history, starting from 2025. We know nothing yet about the syllabus but it’s quite the opportunity to ask what our planet’s problems really are, and how effective the net-zero agenda is as a solution. Rather than be scared to death about the future of the planet, pupils should instead be encouraged to take a rationalist approach. They might ask whether the obsession with climate change in recent decades has taken attention away from the

The right to protest against the policies of the government of the day, the system in general or even just to ‘stick it to the man’, as 1960s radicals used to put it, is fundamental to a free society. But when the freedom to protest is deliberately used by activists to take away the freedom of others to go about their normal lives then we reach an ethical crunch point. One man’s freedom has then become, as it were, another’s suppression and the law must adjudicate between the competing claims. So it is with the campaign tactics of various climate alarmist groups that have sprung up such as Extinction Rebellion,

I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every generation more anxious than the last – and anxious younger, too. There’s a record number of British children diagnosed with anxiety, and a record wait – two years – for therapy, though I’m not at all sure the therapy as it is helps much. The usual idea is that if the kids are troubled, it’s the world that’s to blame: smartphones, Instagram, the constant comparing; Trump, Putin, the existence of Tories; Covid, global warming. No wonder they have the heebie-jeebies. But I think in fact that we’re doing it to

Having just dusted down my Geiger counter and argued with the family about whether or not there is room for our dog, Jessie, in the cellar fallout shelter, I thought I would check in with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to see how long we’ve got before our recently acquired small paddock sprouts its first crop of Cobalt-60. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was begun in 1945 by the physicists who, having devoted several years of their lives to the Manhattan Project, suddenly realised that their striving might not be, in the end, exclusively beneficial for the human race. As the most lionised of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer,

I sat tight and braced myself for the worst this morning — not high winds but for the Today programme to blame storm Eunice on climate change. Sure enough, at a quarter past eight, it didn’t disappoint. While a report acknowledged that it was not possible to blame specific weather events on climate change, Baroness Brown, who sits on the government’s climate change committee, was hauled on the show to explore the link between ‘extreme weather’ and climate change. She suggested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be producing a very frightening report on it soon. The use of the generalised term ‘extreme weather’ — i.e. without including

The alpine slopes of Kenya’s extinct volcanoes are the floral equivalent of Bordeaux. It’s there that the roses grow for the world’s weddings, funerals and Valentine’s Day bouquets. The higher the altitude, the larger your flower head, and roses raised in the shadow of Mount Kenya’s glaciers, or on the vast caldera of Mount Elgon, come in a dazzling spectrum of colours, petal shapes and scents. In normal years, billions of blooms fly out of Nairobi, destined for everywhere from Shanghai and Riyadh to Melbourne and Slough. But in 2020, the roses bloomed in vain. The world’s skies emptied of aircraft in March 2020, and Kenya’s rose growers threw away

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Don’t Look Up, the new satirical film on Netflix. It’s about a couple of American scientists who discover a giant ‘planet-killing’ comet that’s going to collide with Earth in just over six months. They try to warn the world about this existential threat but no one takes them seriously, from the President of the United States on down. Some people half- listen, but then get distracted by gossip or greed or lust, and when they do engage they come up with excuses, like pointing out the science is only 99.78 per cent certain, not 100 per cent, so why don’t we just ‘sit tight

Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet another nightmare about nuclear war. While I rarely dream about mushroom clouds any more, a dark cloud of one shape or another has dogged me like a sooty, vaporous stray for my entire life. For my conservative classmates in the mid-1960s, American democracy was on the cusp of being overtaken by communism, even if they weren’t sure what that bogeyman was. Yet don’t imagine liberals like my parents were by contrast keeping sensibly calm and carrying on. The left has manfully merchandised the end of the world since I can

Reactions to the recent passing of F.W. de Klerk transported me back to my childhood in South Africa. The horror of apartheid was a frequent topic of conversation in our family. My uncle’s law firm, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, pioneered the employment of black people and gave Nelson Mandela his first job as a clerk, in defiance of the accepted practice at the time. My mother was the principal of the only training college for black pre-school teachers and my father, a rabbi, made pastoral visits to Robben Island. We were all-too-aware of the urgent need to dismantle the structural racism that plagued the country. When de Klerk and Mandela