Climate change

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, Insulate Britain and most recently Just Stop Oil.

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 them. It’s us, the parents, carers, teachers in charge.

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, put it at the time (without a great deal of cheer): ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

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.

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 mountains of flowers that could not be exported.

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 and assess’? Or maybe we can solve the problem with technology?

Famed ant specialist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson passed away on December 26, age ninety-two. He came to national attention in 1975 with the publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which is one of those books that steamrolled into public consciousness. It may not have been as revolutionary as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but not for want of trying. Wilson had something new to say about how evolution works and it provoked responses every bit as harsh as those Darwin encountered a century earlier. He was especially reviled by his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, one of the founders of molecular evolutionary theory, who saw no validity at all in Wilson’s interpretation of social structures as embodying evolutionary strategies.

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 remember.