High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

Machynlleth has a small museum-cum-art gallery called the Tabernacle, a compact slate-roofed building not far from the railway station. I headed down there in the morning with Helena. Not being a huge fan of the abstract oil paintings on the wall, I tried instead to engage the white-haired old lady behind the front desk in conversation. It’s always easy, whether you’re in England, Scotland or Wales, to strike up a conversation about the weather.

‘Terrible weather, isn’t it?’ I ventured. The old lady carried on arranging some leaflets on the desk. I noticed her hearing aid, and tried again, more loudly.

‘TERRIBLE WEATHER, ISN’T IT?’

‘Oh yes,’ she answered, ‘such a lot of rain.’

I nodded encouragingly, and she went on. ‘The last few years we’ve had more rain than I ever remember.’ She paused. ‘And no snow either. The last proper snow,’ (and she emphasised the word ‘proper’ to show that she meant snowploughs, the town cut off and so on) ‘was over twenty years ago. The snow we’ve had in the last few years has been hardly anything. Instead, it’s been rain, rain, rain.’

On sale next to the desk were several Christmas cards, each showing children making a snowman under a heavy winter sky, the pretty white flakes swirling around them as they gathered up the snow in their duffle coats and woolly mittens. It was the traditional British winter, everyone’s dream of a white Christmas. And what no one knows – or likes to admit – is that it’s probably gone for good.

SNOW PLACE TO GO

Snow was becoming a rarity even during my childhood. Apart from the years in Peru, I grew up in a small Nottinghamshire village called Colston Bassett – a tiny place with little more than a pub, a primary school, and a local dairy famous for its pungent stilton cheese. Every autumn the village held a harvest festival, when all the local farmers would bring their produce into the village hall for a lavish evening meal. I looked forward to it for two reasons: because I and the other village kids were allowed to get drunk on cider; and because it meant the onset of winter.

I loved winter. From the first frosts in October to the bursting of the buds in April I’d scan the skyline almost hourly for snow. It came, too: we even got snow on Easter Sunday one year. In January 1987 it fell so heavily overnight that the drifts piled up against the side of the house and meant a day off school. The school bus got through after a couple of days, but the snow lasted for almost a fortnight. Every winter there’d always be a few centimetres of snow which would generally last for two or three days. I was filled with barely-suppressed excitement each time the first flakes fluttered past the school windows.

I haven’t seen snow like this for over seven years in Oxford, which isn’t too far from where I grew up. Back in 1996 there were a few days of snow (no big deal, less than ten centimetres deep. I remember it principally because I fell off my bicycle on the ice) but since then nothing. In fact snow has become so rare that when it does fall – often just for a few hours – everything grinds to a halt. In early 2003 a ‘mighty’ five-centimetre snowfall in southeast England caused such severe traffic jams that many motorists had to stay in their cars overnight. Today’s kids are missing out: I haven’t seen a snowball fight in years, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a snowman.

A quick glance at the official weather records for Oxford confirms my rather hazy impressions. The last decent snow was in 1985, when there were twenty-one days of snow cover. The winter of 1963 was the most extreme in England since 1740, and during the 1970s snow days averaged about eight days per season. How things have changed. Six out of the last ten years have been completely snowless, whereas between 1960 and 1990 there were only two snowless winters during the whole three decades.

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By the 2080s our grandchildren will only experience snow on the highest mountaintops in Scotland, because over most of the English lowlands and the south coast snowfall will be virtually unknown.

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Other familiar things may also look very different. Take the average British garden. Lawns will need mowing all year round, and will die in summer droughts unless heavily watered. Traditional herbaceous border species like aster, delphiniums and lupins will also struggle in the dry soils. Tree-ferns, palms, bamboos and bananas will replace holly, oak and ash. Many fruiting trees and bushes need winter chilling for bud formation, so blackcurrants and apples will need to be replaced with peaches and grapes. Overwintering bulbs need low temperatures to stimulate their development, so gardeners will need to dig up the bulbs and refrigerate them for a few days in order to coax spring flowers out of them. New pests and diseases will spread out of the greenhouse and into the open garden. Aphids, for example, begin their infestations two weeks earlier for every 1°C rise in temperature.

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Many of these changes are already underway, but have been accelerating over the last two decades. Termites have already moved into southern England. Garden centres are beginning to stock exotic sub-tropical species, which only a few years ago would have been killed off by winter.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Surrey, horse chestnut trees now come into leaf twelve days earlier than they did in the 1980s. Oak is coming out ten days earlier, and ash six days earlier. Winter aconites are now flowering a month earlier than three decades ago, and crocuses – which used to flower in March – are now putting out petals in mid-January.

(#litres_trial_promo) The average UK growing season is now longer than at any time since records began in 1772. In 2000 there was hardly any cold weather at all: the growing season extended from 29 January to 21 December, leaving just thirty-nine days of winter.

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In the summer of 2003 temperatures broke through the crucial 100°F level for the first time in recorded history, peaking at 100.6°F (38.1°C) on 10 August at Gravesend in Kent. Continental Europe, meanwhile, suffered its highest temperatures for 500 years, sparking catastrophic forest fires in France, Spain and Portugal, and killing thousands of elderly people in the sweltering cities. In France alone almost 15,000 people died in the heatwave, sparking a national crisis of guilt and soul-searching as the bodies piled up. Even in the cooler UK, 2000 people died.

Heatwaves catch the headlines, but the insidious effect of higher average temperatures is having a permanent effect on our surroundings. Indeed, the temperature rise is now so rapid that in climatic terms English gardens are moving south by twenty metres each day.

(#litres_trial_promo) (This is because, with every 1°C rise in temperature, climatic zones move 150 kilometres north.) English temperatures are predicted to soar by up to 5°C this century alone,

(#litres_trial_promo) so by the 2080s our gardens will – metaphorically speaking – be nearing the south of France.

This is particularly bad news for ‘heritage gardens’. The National Trust will be faced with the choice of uprooting everything from its much-loved English country gardens and trucking them to the north of Scotland, or giving up and letting the traditional species die.

In fact the British countryside our grandchildren grow up in is likely to be a very different place to the one we see today. According to the Woodland Trust, increased drought and water stress from hotter, dryer summers means that parts of London, East Anglia and the Midlands might become unsuitable for beech trees in the near future. Although beech woods on chalk soils should fare better (plant roots seem to be able to draw water large distances up through porous chalk rock), die-back has already begun in parts of East Anglia and Southern England. ‘In the worst-case scenarios, beech could soon be absent from large areas of the south,’ the Trust concludes.

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Oaks are also going to be on the endangered list. Although more likely to withstand summer droughts and winter floods, oak trees are threatened by a new disease called oak wilt – which has already devastated woodland in North America.

(#litres_trial_promo) Oak wilt thrives in warmer winters: it could turn into a plague of similar proportions to Dutch Elm Disease, which virtually wiped out elms in the UK, once a common wood and hedgerow tree species. Because of Dutch Elm Disease, I have never seen a fully-grown elm tree: and when I was growing up every field boundary was lined with their enormous skeletal carcasses. Could oaks go the same way?

Instead of these familiar trees, woodlands are likely to be predominantly composed of sycamore, with other invasive species like rhododendron and Japanese knotweed making up the undergrowth. The animals which currently fit into our woodland ecosystems will also disappear – woodpeckers, butterflies, frogs and toads – all will need to move to cooler climes or die.

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In theory woodland species could ‘migrate’ further into the north and west of the British Isles to keep pace with the shifting climatic zones. Many butterflies and birds are already doing this: the speckled wood butterfly has moved north by over a hundred kilometres in the last sixty years – and it’s still lagging behind current rates of climate change.

(#litres_trial_promo) The nuthatch, a colourful tree-dwelling bird, is now extending its range, and the reed warbler has begun for the first time to breed regularly in Scotland and Ireland.

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But whilst birds and butterflies are clearly fairly mobile, most tree species are not. At the end of the last Ice Age trees could colonise new areas at a speed of up to a kilometre a year, by spreading their seeds and gradually establishing new saplings. But projected warming rates will far outstrip this: climatic zones in the twenty-first century will be shifting north seven times faster than most plant species can follow them.

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There are also some serious practical reasons why natural ecosystems can’t simply move with a shifting climate, such as cities, enormous dead zones of intensive farmland and major roads. The great crested newt, for example, couldn’t move north even if it wanted to – it can’t cross the M4 motorway.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nor are my local beechwoods likely to be able to get round Birmingham and Manchester in their supposed long trek north.

Extinction is a certainty for highly-specialised plants and animals which already live in very restricted areas. Norwegian mugwort, a plant which lives only in the Arctic cold of the highest Scottish mountain summits, simply has nowhere higher to go. Nor has the capercaillie, the emblematic Scottish bird which lives in pinewoods and is similarly dependent on low temperatures for its survival. Also on the way out is the natterjack toad – which according to a government study is due to lose its ‘climate space’ as early as 2020, when the seasonal ponds it breeds in dry out. The mountain ringlet butterfly will lose its climate space by 2050, and it too is slated for extinction.

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As with the National Trust’s gardens, climate change will ruin British nature conservation strategies, which are currently based around a patchwork of Sites of Special Scientific Interest and nature reserves. Almost all of these are adapted to specialised habitat – such as upland peatbogs, chalk grasslands or lowland heaths – which depend on particular rocks, soil and topography and therefore, by definition, cannot be moved.

Ecosystems are incredibly complex, with many different species occupying their own niche in the food web. Once these begin to fracture, specialised species will die out in all but the most tiny remnant habitats, to be replaced by only a few highly-adaptable weeds. Biodiversity will decline as these adaptable species, many of them invasive introductions from other parts of the world, take over ever-larger areas of our outdoors.

The British countryside of 2080 is likely to be an eerie, unnerving place, with the same familiar rolling landscape supporting only a few very mobile – but strangely unfamiliar – plants and animals.

Like the Christmas snow, the holly and the ivy may soon be distant memories.

Yet none of this has to happen, or at least not to the extent I’ve outlined above. Some amount of warming is already inevitable, but whether it reaches the extremes described above depends on all of us – and the decisions we take about how to run our lives and our economy. It depends crucially on one thing, and one thing only: how much greenhouse gas we release into the atmosphere over the decades ahead.

On the way back from Wales, I got caught in a traffic jam on the M6 just outside Birmingham. This one was a monster. Three lanes of cars, vans and lorries were packed solid. The whole place stank of petrol and diesel fumes, aggravated by a few irritated motorists who revved their engines pointlessly. A few drivers even got out and stood next to their vehicles, glaring at everyone else, looking for someone to blame. No one spoke. There was none of the camaraderie you often get on a broken-down bus or a delayed train. This was an atomising, frustrating experience. We were all trapped like prisoners in our little metal boxes, and every one of us hated it.

Despite jams and congestion, road traffic in Britain is rising inexorably. Every year Britons spend more time and travel greater distances in their cars. An increasing number of short journeys – under two miles in length, which could easily be done on foot or by bicycle – are now done in cars. Road-traffic levels rose by a fifth between 1988 and 1998, and are predicted to rise by nearly another two-thirds by 2031. Journeys by bicycle, meanwhile, are at an all-time low.

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In many ways car use is a self-reinforcing process. When I was young most children used to walk to school or go by bus. Now – partly because of parental fears about busy roads – the ‘school run’ has become one of the biggest causes of urban congestion. It causes gridlock every morning around eight on many of the roads near where I live. It’s a vicious circle: the more parents who take their kids to school by car, the more cars on the road and the more dangerous the roads become for everyone else, forcing still more parents to resort to their cars. And so it goes on.

Similarly, the growth of out-of-town shopping has encouraged car use, putting town centre shops out of business and reducing the places one can shop without going in the car still further. By building new roads and supporting the growth of supermarkets the government has made matters worse – but we’ve all been complicit in these destructive trends.