I have no idea whether the extreme weather raging outside my window has anything to do with climate change, but I do know that the last major floods in Cumbria were just four years ago; some people had barely recovered before they were hit again last week.
And I wonder how many more people will have to be rescued from their homes by military helicopters before we grasp that the future is not behaving in the way it was supposed to.
The standard response is to say that these floods are a warning of what will happen if we can’t urgently reduce global emissions, that next month’s Copenhagen conference is a turning point, and that we urgently need a deal to stop climate change.
But I can’t say this stuff any more; not because I have stopped believing in climate change, but because I have stopped believing we can prevent it.
As the politicians prepare to fly to Copenhagen, I think of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich in 1938. Everyone could see, then, what the future held: it was there in Hitler’s speeches.
But still Chamberlain hoped for the best. He came back with a worthless agreement and everyone cheered.
We forget now how the public loved Munich. They desperately wanted to believe peace was possible, precisely because it was obvious that it wasn’t.
Perhaps when Copenhagen fails, it will help us to accept that our visions of the future are also skewed by false hope. The mainstream narrative decrees that if we can get the urgent political agreements in place, and produce sufficient turbines and electric cars quickly enough, we can ”stabilise the climate” and carry on as before. It is built on an outdated faith in our reach and our technology, and it is rubbing up hard against the buffers of ecological reality.
We have pushed back the forests, denuded the oceans, exhausted the soil, tipped other species into extinction, expanded our population to the point where we can barely feed ourselves, and changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. There is no quick fix for this, and possibly no fix at all.
Our systems are not designed for it. An economy predicated on constant growth cannot be the engine of a change that urgently demands less of it.
Democracies predicated on giving their consumer citizens what they want are unable to tell them what they cannot have. And the psychology of a culture that reacts in horror to any pothole on the road to Utopia is not well placed to take a different path.
Which is not to say that the End Times are here.
One of the other problems with the climate change narrative is that it offers only two futures: Saving the World, or Apocalypse Now. We will probably get neither.
More realistic is that we will experience what most previous human societies experienced — a painful decline after a period of overexpansion.
We hear a lot about the year 2050: it is a handy date on which to hang our hopes of a ”sustainable society”, which has come to mean business as usual but without the carbon.
It seems much more likely that by 2050 we will be mining our landfill sites for valuable metals and struggling to keep the electricity on, while we dream of the coral reefs that once flowered in the emptying oceans.
It seems to me a descent has begun. A physical descent, from the peak of our oil supplies and our squandering of resources, but also a psychological descent from the peak of our comfortable illusions.
The world is not going to be as we once believed it would be, and if failure at Copenhagen brings that reality nearer, that could be of some use. It might help us to understand that wind farms and green consumerism are not harbingers of a ”sustainable future” but the last gasps of a wounded beast.
We have less chance now of keeping this show on the road than we in Cumbria have of stopping the rain. In both cases, we are going to have to learn to live with the unavoidable. —