Climate change

It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after I became editor. The paper has been part of my life for a very long time. When I was at school, more than 70 years ago, we were all told to read Harold Nicolson’s column every week, to learn the art of essay-writing. I like to think that it was still a good paper in my time, but it is a much better one now. Fraser Nelson and his team are doing an excellent job. Our lives remain dominated by the plague, aka Covid-19. The government’s handling of it — admittedly a difficult task — has not been brilliant, but no worse than the performance of its scientific and medical advisory group (no acronym has ever been less apt than Sage).

This article was originally published on Forbes website, but subsequently taken down.  On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening, it’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, so I may seem like a strange person to be saying this.

COVID-19 is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma and hidden within a Chinese wet market, or possibly a CCP laboratory. World leaders are baffled by how to respond. The science keeps contradicting itself. The world’s greatest mathematicians can’t keep up with the ever-changing data sets. Who can the poor and frightened public turn to for help? Never fear, Greta’s here. That’s right. Little Miss Thunberg, a 17-year-old Swedish girl who dropped out of high school to sound the climate change alarm, is turning her mega-brain towards COVID-19, just when we need her most. On Thursday evening, CNN will host a live town hall called ‘Coronavirus: Facts and Fears’, featuring former acting CDC director Richard Besser, former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Miss Thunberg.

I write this on Easter Sunday, sitting comfortably at home, recovering from my brush with Covid-19. I was hospitalised for 12 days, of which five were in intensive care fighting for my life. While the experience is still fresh — I came out of hospital nine days ago — I thought it may be useful to share some aspects of my journey. They can be divided, I think, into three themes: faith, hope and charity. To begin with, faith. Of all the images that came to me in intensive care, the strongest of all was that of Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. At the time, if I coughed I was unable to perform a following in-breath as my lungs were full of infection. I was being kept alive by a respirator forcing air into my lungs through a pipe inserted into my throat.

As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death and economic ruin. Dr Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometime Green party candidate, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view. In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’ Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for internal XR use, NOT for publication!’ he writes at the head. Small wonder.

Heathrow’s nine runways When was a third runway for Heathrow first proposed? Heathrow was always planned to have multiple runways. On 10 April 1946, before the airport was even open, the Minister for Civil Aviation, Lord Winster, announced that the then London Airport was to have nine runways. Six would be in a Star of David pattern on the present site of Heathrow; the other three would form a triangle to the north of Bath Road, where the current proposal for a third runway is based. This was supposed to allow 160 aircraft movements per hour in good weather and 120 in bad weather. When Winster made his speech, three runways were already under construction. The third was later taken out of use, although part of it is still used as a taxiway.

My parents told me that their wartime childhoods were punctuated by the expression: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ It was used as an excuse for not attending to something urgent. The modern equivalent is the phrase ‘climate emergency’ (leading to ‘extreme weather events’). This emergency is supposedly so great that billions have to be spent on it annually, leaving little time and money for actual emergencies, e.g. floods. The stupidity of XR digging up the lawn outside the gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, needs no further comment. The event does bring home our cultural change. Shortly before I went up to Trinity in the mid-1970s, a few young bloods drove some ducks up from the Backs at dawn.