Our house is on fire and it’s not a metaphor
I made a shirt with the words ‘OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE’ on it in flaming colours. I’d be wearing it now if it wasn’t so damned hot. The UK has now joined southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and many other areas in experiencing temperatures of around 40C. Fire and emergency services up and down the Eastern half of the country were stretched to the limit. Firefighters in Norfolk, where I now live, were called to 300 incidents.
So, yes, the impacts of climate breakdown are affecting the UK, we are feeling it, and particular incidents are being reported on national news. However, social media, news, and also the Conservative leadership debate, are writhing with climate denialism. Before the heatwave hit the UK, there were memes and news articles spreading, saying that it’s hysterical, that these temperatures are manageable, and that it’s no different from 1976, and so on.
Then during and afterwards there were insensitive ads and reframings of the immediate and general crisis. Here is just one example, from Easyjet. The repositioning of the tweet against a London fire is taken from an Instagram post by Adapt: Climate Club.
This is a mix of corporations and public responding to their desires for normality to continue, with deliberate misinformation fed through these channels from the fossil fuel lobbies (Net Zero Watch etc), designed to confuse us so that we end up in inertia. They hope that the impacts of climate change won’t be so bad that we don’t notice, or that we will see extractive industries as our benefactors, profiting so that they can help us meet our essential needs. They will carry on making us feel that without fossil fuels and the entire system depending on them (such as agribusiness), we cannot be happy or survive, even as this system causes wars, starvation and disaster. We need to expose and talk about this.
George Monbiot says: “what cannot be discussed cannot be addressed. Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation”.
This conspiracy of silence creates an invisibility shield around the profits made by the fossil fuel sector. There is an assumption built into the economic system that sustainability means maintaining business as usual, so the people in these extractive businesses cannot think beyond continuing to profit from an activity that they have known for 50 years is destroying the planet. And, every single day of those 50 years the sector has accumulated $3 billion in pure profit. And the profit is used to expand their operations, including buying social licence to operate through media and culture.
But right is on our side. Law is sometimes even on our side. ClientEarth won their case that the UK’s climate response is inadequate. The High Court ruled that the Net Zero strategy is unlawful.
So, what do we do with this rightness? There will be more extreme events. It’s still happening across the half the globe, and more high temperatures are forecast for early August. We have to turn the tide on communications, and those of us who work in culture, media — or have any kind of influence (which is all of us) — have to push back against the billionaires, plutocrats and deniers.
- We have to speak for the medical experts, who are absolutely clear this is a health emergency. We have to speak for the emergency workers, dealing directly with these dangerous impacts.
- We have to speak for the vulnerable, people with dementia who don’t know how to plan, children whose schooling is disrupted…
- We have to speak for the Global South, for the Most Affected People and Areas. It’s clear that climate breakdown is a legacy of colonialism and systemic racism, which continues. We need more climate reporting that shows this bigger picture — more global experiences, more ecological factors, and more focus on transformative adaptation and coping / recovery strategies.
- We have to speak for those struggling in the cost of living crisis. Tackling the Earth crisis is not taking money away from them. The opposite. Renewable energy is cheaper. Plant-based diets are cheaper. Redistribution of wealth to ensure private sufficiency and public luxury is an important strategy for action (and that’s why they want to silence us!)
- We have to speak for the more-than-human beings. Fires, tree diseases, crop failures, animal deaths from heat stress, all significant for the impact on all those beings. And, in turn, significant for the longer term impact on humans.
- We have to speak for the scientists — to amplify what they say as carefully as we can, being critical where scientists seem to be simplifying or ‘begging questions’.
The reason why meteorologists are concerned about UK records potentially being broken by 2 degrees (not fractions of a degree) is that this shows an extreme and rapid divergence from stable Earth system patterns. The stable state would see an expectation of freak heat events like this once in 100–1000s of years, reduced now to once in 100–300 years, and modelled conservatively to reduce to once in every 15 years by 2100 (under a medium emissions scenario). BUT that is just based on linear climate modelling that builds from trends and looks at GHG emissions. Models should also account for all the other GHGs, and all the ecocidal actions in our agricultural and industrial systems, and all the feedback effects of climate breakdown itself. It might be impossible to conceive for scientists who do linear modelling with single factors, but it is possible — and likely — that we could see these high temperatures most summers, with the knock-on effects making temperatures increase.
