Climate change

The thousands of children across the UK on ‘strike’ from school today to protest climate change are admirable. They’re part of a movement, Fridays for Future, which wants more aggressive measures to reduce emissions. It seems clear to me that climate change is real, man-made and requires action. If these kids can do their bit to make this point, good luck to them. Okay, some might just fancy bunking off from double maths or be dabbling in fashionable politics for its shareability on social media. Either way, what these children can’t expect is special treatment. There are calls from adults — almost exclusively those who agree with the aims of the walkout — for schools to show leniency to the strikers.

One of the few pleasures of advancing age is that, no matter how awful some looming catastrophe may be, you can always remember a time that was worse. On hearing the polar vortex was headed for Chicago last week, my wife and I smugly reminisced about having survived the coldest night in the city’s history — 20 January 1985 — when the mercury fell to -27ºF, or -33ºC. (Temperature scales are a nuisance in accounts of this sort — more on that below.) Spurning the temptation to huddle beneath blankets, we went out for deep-dish pizza, thinking we’d have the joint to ourselves. On the contrary, it was packed. We had to stand in line, mercifully in the unheated vestibule rather than the sidewalk. We had a blast.

When I first heard rumours that Michael Gove was planning to go round the country with his environmental Gestapo, ripping out our wood-burning stoves in order to heal the planet, greenwash conservatism and reduce an imaginary 36,000 deaths a year, I must admit that a small part of me felt ever so slightly relieved. Of all the desirable accessories that I’ve coveted in my life, I don’t think any has quite disappointed me as much as the wood-burning stove now staring at me accusingly as I sit at my desk. It looks very handsome and room-furnishing, as cast-iron stoves do. And when it gets going, it really does pump out lots of heat. But there’s a reason, you eventually realise, why western civilisation graduated from such 18th-century technology to central heating.

It’s not like the green blob to keep quiet when there’s a threat to the environment in the offing. Even the smallest hint of a problem is usually enough to work a tree-hugger into a frenzy. So it’s worth taking a look at their decision to keep shtum over the recent appearance of what may be one of the greatest threats to the natural world we have seen. Over the last few weeks, scientists and campaigners alike have been turning their attention to the question of how land can be used to tackle global warming. Their interest was prompted by the appearance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on how the increase in global temperatures might be kept below 1.5°C.

When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I land in the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky, I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who did not like Trump at first, but would vote twice for his re-election if he could, because of the jobs boom and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired salesman who tutors kids from poor backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess that makes me a conservative,’ he says. I had to lecture in semi-darkness in Louisville, after a power cut plunged most of the university into darkness.

Phew! The dangers of global warming are receding. Admittedly that is not how most news sources are reporting the publication of the latest IPCC report this morning. But it is the logical conclusion of reading coverage of the issue over the past decade. According to today’s IPCC report we now have 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. That might not sound long, but it means we are a good deal further away from doom that we were in 2007, when the WWF said we had five years to save the world. The doomsday clock hadn’t moved in 2011 when the International Energy Agency warned us that we had five years to start slashing carbon emissions or lose the chance forever.

The Times reports this morning that Bournemouth business leaders are hugely annoyed with the BBC, whose weather app predicted thick cloud and thunderstorms for the recent bank holiday. In the event, it was sunny and warm, but the damage had already been done, and takings on the seafront were said to be down by nearly 40 percent as people decided to stay at home rather than risk a soaking. While weather forecasting is undoubtedly getting better, it seems fairly clear that ultra-local forecasts of the kind you find on weather apps can be very misleading: reducing the whole forecast to a single icon, as most apps do, removes all the nuance. The lesson seems to be that if you are going to make a decision based on a forecast, you should watch the TV weather and get it explained to you.

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Matt Ridley on why wind turbines are not the answer to our energy needs: The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’. You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong.