High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

Although I wasn’t sure how climate change might fit into it, my concern about the environment was a long-standing preoccupation. I grew up in a country being rapidly destroyed by economic ‘growth’ and ever-increasing consumption. I saw my local shops in Oxford struggling and then closing down once big supermarkets opened on the outskirts of town. I saw pubs with real heritage turned into heritage theme pubs, and streets turned into elongated car parks. I saw rat runs and road rage, and I coughed in the fumes of my own car in motorway traffic jams on the way to work.

Then, spurred into action like many others during the mid-1990s, I climbed trees and dug tunnels to try and stop the building of yet another road. I loved the tall trees, the clear streams and the shaded wild garlic meadows, and something inside me snapped every time I heard the chainsaws and saw the old oaks and beeches come crashing down. I’d grown up trusting that things would generally get better, and that ‘progress’ worked. Now I wasn’t so sure. Even in itself the destruction seemed senseless – but what if it was presaging a wider destruction, giving birth to a society which would poison itself for decades into the future as well?

After the Newbury Bypass was completed, I drove through it, trying to recognise landmarks on either side of the open concrete wound. I saw it fill up with traffic, every car pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And I joined the activists’ reunion on the day we blocked the road with a banner and hurled stones down onto the crisp new tarmac from the lifeless earthworks all around.

But what if I’d been missing the bigger picture? What if the real Newbury Bypass tragedy wasn’t just that a forest in Berkshire was destroyed, but that an island in the Pacific was drowned or a Nicaraguan family swept away in a flash flood? What if the local was the global after all? My work at OneWorld had given me an insight into the wider world, and I felt the connection, but it was a hazy picture.

It wasn’t long before I would start seeking answers. My journey had almost begun.

I spent that Christmas at my parents’ small farm in Llangybi, North Wales. It was still raining, and I had to complete the trip up the coast from Machynlleth by bus, because the railway track was cut by flooding (an increasingly frequent occurrence, according to the bus driver). On Christmas Eve my father and I spent the day stretching new fencing around one of the sheep fields, stabbing the rocky earth with a long iron bar to make holes for the wooden posts.

On clear days there is a glorious panorama from Snowdon in the north down to Cadair Idris and even Pembrokeshire in the south, but we could see nothing, just mist and relentless soaking drizzle. Even the sheep looked miserable and bedraggled as they nibbled at the closecropped grass. We worked almost in silence, pulling out muddy stones by hand and banging the posts in quickly before the narrow holes filled with water from the saturated ground.

My mother had a fire blazing in the living-room stove when we came back in, and with my brother and sisters also having arrived we sat down for the customary family slideshow. My father set up the projector, whilst I moved a painting to make enough white space for the image. He’d selected slides of Peru, where the whole family had lived during his overseas geological posting between 1979 and 1982.

The projector whirred, and there we all were, back in 1980 – my brother Richard, just a few weeks old, yelling in a pram outside the house; my little sister Suzanne looking startled in a flowery dress; my elder sister and I naked and tanned on a dark-sanded Pacific beach, building sand-castles; then all of us in the Peruvian Andes, the snowy peaks of the Cordillera Blanca towering behind us. I’d seen the pictures dozens of times, but I was still entranced. My father flicked on to a field trip he’d done the same year with his geologist colleagues into a place called Jacabamba.

‘That’s my altitude record,’ he commented gruffly, over a slide of a pristine snowfield, gleaming brilliant white in the tropical sun. ‘Five thousand, two hundred metres.’ The projector whirred again, revealing an enormous fan-shaped glacier looming over a small lake. Icebergs were floating in it, having tumbled down from the glacier above. It was a spectacular sight.

‘What a place!’ I breathed.

‘I loved it. Incredibly hard work, carrying drilling equipment around to take rock samples, and then spending freezing nights in those crappy old orange tents. But I loved it.’

‘It may not be the same now. I’ve heard that glacial retreat in the tropical Andes is pretty rapid.’

‘Perhaps. But that was a pretty big glacier. Once an iceberg that calved off it into the lake created a huge set of waves which washed away half our equipment. There were ice avalanches coming down from above the whole time.’ He paused. ‘Still, maybe it has changed. I don’t suppose I’ll ever go back, but I wonder what it does look like now.’

‘I wonder…’ I repeated slowly.

Then I said nothing for a while. I’d just had an idea.

That night, in many ways, marked the start of the journey described in this book. Over the next three years I would visit five continents, searching for the fingerprints of global warming. I would interview Mongolian herders, Alaskan Eskimos, Tuvaluan fishermen, American hurricane chasers and a whole army of scientists, all with an urgent story to tell. It was a story, when I first heard it, that left me both shocked and inspired: shocked, because of how few outsiders realised the magnitude of what was unfolding, and inspired because there was still time to avert a far greater catastrophe.

This global quest wouldn’t be easy, and at one point it would almost cost me my life. But at the end of it all I knew I would return to Wales with a box of slides. I would draw the curtains. I would set up the projector. And then I would answer my father’s question.

1 Britain’s Wet Season (#ulink_3ff31387-e113-521b-b8f0-2de46ca8eef2)

It was still raining, and York station was in complete chaos. The railway track was underwater both north and east of the city, and trains for Edinburgh, Newcastle and Aberdeen were terminating there, disgorging their tired and confused passengers into the mêlée. People dragged their luggage in and out of crowded waiting rooms as train after train listed on the display board was cancelled. Harassed staff tried to show passengers alternative routes via local buses, whilst others simply fled from the station concourse, pursued by angry travellers demanding to know how they could ever reach their destinations.

It was the beginning of November 2000. By the end of the month Britain would have experienced some of the heaviest rainfall and worst flooding ever recorded. On the miserable Friday night I arrived in York, newspapers and radio shows were already buzzing with speculation. This wasn’t normal, everyone agreed. Floods had come and gone before, and Britain was supposed to be rainy. But no one could remember anything like this. There had to be some new explanation.

October had also been a washout. On 11 October Kent, Sussex and Hampshire received ten centimetres of rain – more than a month’s usual average in a single day. Sixty government flood warnings were issued for the southeast of England, and the residents of Uckfield awoke to find their town centre under more than a metre of water. Lifeboats rescued people stranded in their homes, and one shopkeeper was washed away by the rising flood as he tried to open his shop door. Horrified neighbours looked on as he was sucked down the high street by the torrent. ‘He didn’t even have a chance to scream, the water was so fierce,’ one told a Guardian journalist. (‘“Unheard of” rain sweeps the south’ was the newspaper’s dramatic headline.

(#litres_trial_promo)) Happily, the shopkeeper was later found clinging to a riverbank.

Close by, a supermarket’s windows caved in under the pressure of the water, and stock began to float off the shelves and away down the street. In Lewes, a town downstream on the same river, council staff had to drive around with a loudhailer warning residents in low-lying areas to evacuate to higher ground. Six lifeboatmen were lucky to escape with their lives when their boat was nearly trapped under a bridge.

And still it kept on raining. The government’s countryside minister, Elliot Morley, was one of the first to acknowledge something unusual when he visited the area the next day. ‘We seem to be having more violent weather patterns and we accept that it could be due to global warming,’ he said.

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Was the minister right? Had climate change indeed come home to Britain?

York was dark and eerily deserted. The heavy rain had turned to heavy sleet, and just a few cars splashed through the huge puddles that had gathered in the road. I walked along beside the old city walls, down towards the river.

The Ouse was almost unrecognisable. There was no sign of a riverbank – instead the water reached right round the buildings on both sides, and was almost touching the top of the arches of the road bridge. In the glow of the streetlights it looked as slick as oil, but also seemed to be moving impossibly fast, swirling forcefully around the stones of the bridge. In both directions streets which had usually led to boatyards, pubs and restaurants were deserted, the bustle of people replaced with lapping black water.

The worst of the rain had fallen two days earlier, when an intense depression – the remnants of an Atlantic hurricane – crossed the country, dumping several inches on the Pennine Hills. With the ground already saturated from previous deluges, the new water simply sluiced off into the rivers Nidd, Wharfe and Aire. The Aire valley was particularly hard-hit, and in the Yorkshire towns of Keighley, Skipton and Bingley families had been forced to camp out in leisure centres and bed and breakfast accommodation. Further downstream in Leeds the runoff overtopped embankments usually eight metres above the water level, turning city streets into canals temporarily reminiscent of Venice.

York is often hit by floods, but it was soon apparent that this disaster was off the usual scale. The day before I arrived, the Archbishop of York had paddled around his palace in a dinghy, whilst tourist rowing boats had been commandeered to evacuate an old people’s home. That day the water was within half a metre of breaching flood defences, which would have submerged another seven hundred houses.

On 2 November, as I peered over the bridge at the rising River Ouse, the nationwide floods were already the most extensive on record. But the worst was yet to come.

No one knew where I could catch a bus to Scarborough (the railway line was under a metre and a half of water at Malton). I found the coach almost by accident on the station forecourt, already besieged by bedraggled travellers, most of whom wanted it to be going somewhere other than Scarborough. Rain was still coming down in torrents and people hurried on board, shaking off their umbrellas on the bus steps. The journey took much longer than usual, and as we passed through the Yorkshire lowlands the darkness outside was inky black through the steamed-up windows.

My sister’s husband Steve was waiting in his car when we arrived.

‘The main road to Filey’s cut off,’ he said. ‘But there are other ways in on the country roads, so I’m pretty sure we’ll get through.’

As we left Scarborough the rain turned halfway back into sleet, and began to pelt down at an even more incredible rate. Steve had to slow right down, and with the headlights on full beam the drops falling from the sky seemed to unfold like curtains. Water was simply sheeting off the fields into the road, collecting in any dips and low points in large ponds. We passed a big roundabout near Filey which was almost entirely submerged. In the flashing headlights of an emergency vehicle I could see a stranded car in what looked like a lake. We tried several other routes, before finally making it through to Filey on the last open road.

The scale of the damage became clear next morning. Just across the street from my sister’s house is a small stream which runs down to the beach in a narrow cutting, next to a tarmac path which is shaded by trees in the summer. All the way down the valley the path had been ripped up – huge slabs of tarmac tossed around and dumped with piles of other debris on the beach. Rubbish was stranded a metre or so up the trees, showing how high the water level had reached. I hadn’t seen it happen, but it was clear that what had taken place in that quiet valley was virtually a flash flood. Filey was still officially cut off, and all the way along the back of the beach mudslides had fallen from the saturated cliff face. In the town itself, various front gardens had turned into small lakes.

Even then it didn’t stop raining. There was a brief respite for a couple of days, but weather reports identified another storm already gathering out in the Atlantic, where higher-than-average sea surface temperatures were giving the depressions more energy and moisture than usual. In York more than 4000 homes were evacuated as the river crested at levels unmatched in over a century. The tiny village of Naburn, just south of the town, became an island – veterans of the Mozambique floods from the International Rescue Corps were drafted in to help safeguard lives and belongings. Nationwide the death toll now stood at eight. In Naburn there was some good news: a baby was born, tended by a midwife also marooned on the new village-island, and the milkman was still able to make deliveries, albeit by Land-Rover.

On Sunday I returned to York – by road, since the railway was still cut off – to find a city under siege. The sense of crisis was heightened by crowds of sightseers, and by TV crews giving breathless live reports in front of the still-rising river. Brown water lapped around the foot of the castle mound, and in many riverfront streets pumps were fighting to extract water from basements, multiple hosepipes discharging back out into the road. On the west side of the river sandbags had been piled high along the tops of walls.

As I walked around, leaks were springing up everywhere, leading in some places to mini-waterfalls cascading down the bank of sandbags. On the other side of this fragile barrier thousands of tonnes of river water were perilously close to escape – a fact that seemed lost on all the people who, like myself, wandered around carelessly below river level to take pictures. Somewhere on the other side of the defences was a riverside park, though only trees and the tops of bushes testified to its continued existence.

York escaped complete disaster by a mere five centimetres that day, although a thousand properties had already been submerged. It was the worst flooding in four hundred years of records. The River Ouse had peaked five and a half metres higher than normal, and the city centre was only saved by the round-the-clock efforts of police, soldiers and firemen shifting 65,000 sandbags to hold back the water.

And York was far from alone – in Shropshire, Shrewsbury was also being hit hard, as was Bewdley in Worcestershire. Downstream from York a lake the size of Windermere, the largest in the English Lake District, had formed: as my train travelled south back down to Oxford, passengers gawped at the new inland sea (complete with large white-capped waves) which had obliterated fields for miles on both sides of the raised track.

As people cast around for a cause, different theories were advanced. Some blamed new housing developments on river floodplains, whilst others claimed that new farming practices meant that water ran off ploughed fields too quickly. But although both may have played a role, they were far from being the whole story. The truth was much more straightforward: Britain had simply been deluged with a staggering amount of rain.

More than three times the normal monthly average of rain fell in parts of the southeast and Yorkshire. Whilst in most places the deluges were judged to be a once in a century event, rainfall totals were sometimes so extreme that they far outweighed previously-observed natural variability. Plumpton in East Sussex recorded 144 millimetres in a single twenty-four-hour period, something that would be expected only once every 300 years,

(#litres_trial_promo) whilst the River Uck catchment in the same county had a thirty-day rainfall total that should only occur once every 650 years.

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Most floods come and are gone again in a few days at most. But in October and November 2000 storm relentlessly followed storm, leaving no time for the water to drain away. In England and Wales the September to December 2000 rainfall total was the highest since records began in 1766. In major river basins the floods were the most extreme of any ninety-day period on record, and for shorter time periods were only outranked by the March 1947 ‘Great Floods’ – which had been generated by rapid snowmelt and rain running off still-frozen ground, and thus were much briefer.

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But even very extreme events – which happen only once in a lifetime or even less – can still be part of the natural variability of the climate. A single flood, however dramatic and destructive, isn’t enough to convince a scientist that global warming is to blame. In order to be able to identify more clearly humanity’s telltale fingerprint on the climate, there has to be a trend – evidence of a definite longer and wider change for which other causal factors can be confidently ruled out.

THE ‘SMOKING GUN’?