Burning Down the House

As promised earlier......

[The original version of this essay on climate change was drafted in the summer of 2022 and first published in a UK Literary journal early in 2023. Please see the second half of my previous post for full details]

Burning Down the House

“Hubris: […..] excessive pride towards, or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.” – The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

1989 was an eventful year for the people of this little planet. In March, the Exxon Valdez super-tanker collided with Bligh’s Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling 37,000 tonnes of crude oil into the ocean, the largest spill of oil in US waters, until the Deepwater Horizon explosion 21 years later, which in the course of 87 days pumped 798,000 tonnes of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and remains the biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the petroleum industry. In June all eyes were on the students protesting against the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square, creating one of the most iconic images of the 20^th century as the lone demonstrator known only to history as Tank Man faced down one of the formidable Type 59’s that had been sent in to clear the square. November saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, a seismic symbolic and literal collapse that marked the end of the Cold War, reuniting East and West for the first time since the end of the Second World War nearly half a century before. Two weeks later the people of Czechoslovakia overthrew their own government in the Velvet Revolution, catalysing a shift towards a more democratic style of administration after 41 years of single party rule. 1989 was also the year the Galileo Space Probe was launched on its lonely journey to study Jupiter and its moons, becoming the first man-made object to orbit one of the solar system’s outer planets, ultimately travelling a distance of 2.88 billion miles in the course of its mission, illustrating what a miniscule space the earth occupies in the grand scheme of infinite cosmic universe.

None of this meant anything to me though, a blonde haired, blue-eyed, butter-wouldn’t-melt boy of nine. Imagine me sitting in front of the TV early that summer on one of those endless Saturday mornings of mid-childhood, bathed in the amniotic warmth of the sunshine streaming in through the bay window while I watch The ITV Chart Show. In amongst the flavour-of-the-week pop hits – the London Boys, Sonya, Sinnita, Jason Donovan - the programme is showing the Indie Chart. I don’t know what this is, but I can’t take my eyes off the screen.

I’m watching a grainy monochrome video, out of focus as if it’s been filmed through a dirty lens, featuring a large man with a buzz cut and a lumberjack shirt, a woman with crow’s nest hair and a faraway look in her eyes; as she gazes past the camera into the distance, the shot cuts to close-ups of her fingers moving over the neck of a weird guitar that only appears to have four strings. There’s a drummer and another guitarist too, blurred at the edges like pictures smudged in charcoal, playing their instruments so carelessly it looks like they’re doing it as an afterthought while their minds are on something else.

I’ve never heard anything like it; the overlapping melodies of what I now know is Kim Deal’s bass and Joey’s lead guitar lines, the harmonies sweet and sour like the clashing taste of the sherbert lemons my grandad always buys me just so he can eat half of them himself. The music is by turns quiet and loud, vocals spoken then screamed, the woozy camera panning around in ceaseless motion which does little to reduce the disorientating effect on my young senses. To a kid raised in a house where music means Phil Collins, Tina Turner, Cher and my mam’s Cliff Richard records, this is revolutionary stuff. I’m transfixed.

The TV is a huge, boxy thing, older than I am, and being of an age to remember when the telly in the kitchen in our old house was black and white, I’ve never so much as heard of a remote control, so I shuffle forward and dial up the volume a couple of notches, waiting for my old man to come in and tell me to turn that bloody racket down, until I remember he’s at work and won’t be home for another couple of hours. This is a pleasing thought, so I turn it up some more and scooch closer to the screen. The guy in the flannel shirt is singing something about a hole in the sky and a monkey that’s gone to heaven. It’s such a simple hook that by the end I’m singing along as if it’s an old favourite even though I’ve never heard it – or anything like it - before, safe in the knowledge that I’ll love this song forever which, thirty-odd years on, I still do.

At school that week we’d been learning about the Ozone Layer, or, more specifically, the hole in it that had been caused by chemicals – CFC’s – from things like deodorant cans, and how terrible it would be for the planet if it were allowed to continue. Mr Mason, our class teacher, whose son Chris is now the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, also spoke of something called Global Warming, caused by these things called greenhouse gases that meant the world would get too hot for people to live in if nothing was done. I had no way of relating this first lesson in environmentalism to what Frank Black was singing on TV that day, but the idea of the earth suffering because of what humans were doing to it was a new one on me, and I was terrified.

Does this mean we’re all going to die? I remember asking timidly, hoping for comfort but fearing the worst, imagining a future in which the whole world was on fire, the helpless population running around screaming as they’re consumed by the flames.

Not at all. Mr Mason smiled his placid smile beneath his bristling greyblack ‘tache. The good news is, we can all do something about it, and that’s what we’re going to start learning about today. I’m going to tell you all about how to go green.

When I was a kid I was keenly interested in natural history. My old man used to sit for hours watching shows about it – The Trials of Life was a major one at the time; The Flight of the Condor was another favourite – and I’d cosy up on the fag-burned sofa to watch them with him. We didn’t have much money so the big fella was at work most of the time, out the door before my older sister and I went to school, home for his tea at five then back to work for a couple of hours overtime, a quick half hour with us before bedtime if we were lucky, half the weekends lost to his extra Saturday hours. Watching those shows was one of the few things we ever managed to do together, and they were all the more precious to me because of it.

As soon as I became aware of human life affecting the planet, I wanted to do something to help. What would happen to all the beautiful animals I so loved to watch if people were killing the earth? I’d already learned about endangered species from David Attenborough and a Readers Digest encyclopaedia of nature that I liked to leaf through whenever I had nothing to do. Never mind that it was a book written for adults; I was a precocious reader, so I made as much sense out of it as I could and whenever I got stuck, I just looked at my favourite pictures. One was a full-page image of a mother tiger carrying her cub in her mouth, the mix of unspeakable tenderness and awesome raw power clear even to a child; another was an aerial shot of a blue whale breaching the surface of the ocean, a creature so huge my little brain could barely conceive of it; best of all was one that showed a majestic osprey captured at the instant it began to pull away from the surface of a lake with a fat silver salmon wriggling in its talons. How could people let themselves do anything that would harm these creatures? It had to be stopped.

Environmentalism became something of a cause celebre at my school, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Mr Mason taught us about waste, how much food was thrown away each year while children in Africa starved, why it was important to try to reuse things, the huge difference we could make by doing our bit. Children love a crusade, and my class was hooked. Everyone was totally on board until he mentioned recycled toilet paper, which we literally thought was pre-used arsewipe, and I’ll never forget the sound of all thirty of us making synchronised mock-puking sounds when he told us about it – a concept it as hilarious as it was horrifying. It wasn’t enough to dissuade us though.

As we moved up through school these lessons continued. There was one teacher, Mr Whinray, of a type that’s now probably gone the way of the dodo and the Eurasian Auroch. He was a red-nosed hippy with a ginger beard and an acoustic guitar who wrote his own songs for us to sing, a mixture of born-again, evangelical, nouveau-hymns, and bittersweet allegories about deforestation and saving the whales. Twenty five years later I was stoned in the pub with a couple of old comrades who’d also been taught by him, and we were discombobulated to realise that we could remember not just the music and melody to one of his songs – a simple, folky lament purposefully strummed in a minor key - but the words too.

Don’t want a picture in a book/I want to know what’s real/want to be able to look and touch/to know how an animal feels/don’t want a land of make-believe/thinking what might have been/want to be able to see for myself/and know that it’s not a dream.

We were pissed out of our heads and scoffing at the memory of him in a way that was far from kind, but how much of a mark must he have left if we could still remember after all those years?

In our final term, the head teacher, Mr Selby, ran a competition to see who could come up with the best idea for an invention to help the environment. At that age I craved approval from my teachers in a way that the teen punk version of me completely rejected once I got to high school and still, ridiculously, makes me cringe today. As soon as the contest was announced, I was determined that I was going to win. No one cared as much about the environment as I did, so no one was allowed to beat me. My best friend Daniel and I got straight down to business, sketching crude designs in our notebooks that quickly turned into childish blueprints for our ecological masterpiece, Robbie the Recycling Robot.

He was made from two carboard boxes, a huge one on the bottom with a smaller one on top, blathered in a couple of gallons of poster paint in a lurid green of the kind that in a cartoon would usually signify, ironically, toxic waste, with a face drawn on to look like Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies, which were huge at the time and we both loved. In place of a mouth there was a circular hole with tinfoil flaps stuck on to look like metal teeth; this was where you could shove old pop cans or empty baked bean tins – scrupulously washed out with hot water and Fairy Liquid as we’d been taught, of course – which would fall into the big box at the bottom, until it was full enough for it all to be bagged up and taken away for recycling.

We knew with the certainty of youth that it was a genius idea and were confident even before we’d started building it that victory was assured. So it proved. We won first prize, and I was ecstatic. I’d never won anything before so my joy at this simple fact was unbounded; but to triumph in a competition related to something as important as recycling, which, let’s face it, was going to help save the world, was something else entirely. On presentation day, Daniel and I were awarded a certificate and a medal each, and a photograph of us and our prize-winning robot was displayed in pride of place on the big noticeboard in the school hall. My mam had a copy of the photograph made and for a couple of years it was one of my most treasured possessions, kept in a gold-coloured frame on a bookshelf in my bedroom as a permanent record of my finest hour. It showed the pair of us, one on each side of the cardboard monstrosity, grinning toothily beneath our floppy fringes in that awkward way kids have when they’re on the cusp of adolescence, bursting with pride but tempered with the unspoken fear that this was probably not even slightly cool, unsure whether or not we should be looking so pleased with ourselves, or if it was even okay to be caught smiling at all.

Daniel and I had been thick as thieves for a few years, but winning that competition proved to be our last hurrah, and we went our separate ways when we moved to High School. We didn’t exactly fall out, just drifted apart in the way kids do; by then the picture on the shelf had been dismissed as an embarrassing reminder of immature folly, a time when I’d been suckered into toeing the line, doing exactly what I was told and fawning like a puppy at the pat on the head I’d received in return.

Years later, I saw Daniel at some eighteenth birthday party or other at a sports club in town. I was in the sixth form, and he’d left school after GCSE’s to go straight into the world of full-time employment. I thought it might be nice to have a chat and see what he was up to, but he had other ideas. One of his new mates had told him – incorrectly, not that I was bothered in the slightest - that I was gay because I sometimes wore nail varnish and eyeliner, news which went down like the Hindenburg on fire in the ultra-conservative world of mid-90’s small-town Yorkshire. Spewing homophobic abuse, he hurtled over and tried to hit me over the head with a beer bottle. I ducked out of the way and shoved him aside and there was a bit of a scuffle after that, his mates holding him back while he kept trying to get at me with this bottle, pure hate burning in his eyes. I walked out of the door without so much as a backwards glance and never saw him again, although I regret to this day that I didn’t turn around and deck the fucker. The picture of the three of us – Daniel, Robbie and I – is still around though, gathering dust in the bottom of a box in my mam and dad’s loft with some battered china of dubious quality, a few bits of costume jewellery, and a photo of Bonnie, our long dead Labrador.

*****

Thirty three years have passed since that Saturday morning, and in that time the global picture has radically changed. 1992 saw the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit. 154 states signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which sought to establish international co-operation to combat “dangerous human interference in the climate system,” including stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. By 1997 anthropogenic climate change had been scientifically demonstrated to the point that signatories to the Kyoto Agreement promised to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, based on the premise that climate change is a real issue, and these gasses are a significant contributing factor. The 2015 Paris Agreement built on this, with signatories aiming for ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050, although as we’ll see, those targets may already be unachievable.

Climate change, and environmentalism in its broader sense (such as the worry about the amount of plastic that’s dumped into the ocean, and how the resultant microplastics have been seen to enter food chains), is now much more of a feature of the wider public consciousness than it was when I was a child, spearheaded by people like three times Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg, who says with some justification that the young people of today will be disproportionately affected. Her school strikes for climate, which began in 2018, are a part of the Global Climate Movement, which has seen numerous world-wide events protesting climate change such as the 2014 People’s Climate March, and the 2019 Global Climate Strike. Protests like these, and the work done by groups like Extinction Rebellion does a lot to raise awareness and lobby for change, and the growth of the Youth Climate Movement suggests there is a will – certainly amongst those most likely to suffer the negative impacts – to alter the trajectory. But will this be enough? The patronisingly dismissive response to Thunberg from the privileged old white men that make up the majority of the Western world’s leaders says a lot.

Environmentalism has been an emotive issue going all the way back to the controversy over Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 work Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of pesticides on ecosystems and the negative impacts on human health when they entered the food chain, amongst other things. The book was heavily criticised upon publication, chiefly by representatives of the American chemical industry who saw it as a PR disaster and, more importantly, a potentially potent financial threat. Big business takes a dim view of scientists whose inconvenient questioning of the party line may be damaging to profit margins, so now, at a time when new research suggests that fossil fuel companies and petrostates have made a staggering $52 trillion in profit since 1970 – equating to a cool $2.8 billion/£2.3bn per day – it’s easy to see why some are keen to challenge the narrative on climate change.

1989 saw the founding of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a group of businesses including General Motors, Exxon, Texaco, Shell Oil and BP, which lobbied against legislation aimed at stemming climate change by publicly questioning the science behind it. During the period it was active, the GCC spent $13 million on lobbying against the Kyoto Agreement alone. It disbanded in 2001 in the face of mounting evidence about the link between human activity and climate change, but by then US President George Bush Jr had withdrawn the US from the Kyoto Protocols so some would say the group had accomplished its mission. Other organisations, such as the George C Marshall Institute and its immediate successor the CO2 Coalition have continued, with financial backing from the fossil fuel industry, to push environmental scepticism and publicly question the scientific basis for man-made climate change.

In the mid-2000’s, fossil fuel companies decided to try a different tack. BP launched the concept of the personal Carbon Footprint, a cynical marketing move aimed at shifting responsibility away from corporations and convincing individuals that they weren’t doing enough to help. Everyone needed to “go on a low-carbon diet” and up their game by flying less, eating locally sourced food, buying goods that have minimal transport costs and therefore create less emissions. It was even suggested that people could help by having less children, a neo-Malthusian claim of staggering speciousness, as if future breeding habits could offset the huge amount of damage that’s already been, and continues to be, done.

Amazingly, many people fell for this gaslighting, resulting in a boom of personal carbon footprint calculators and much agonising over foreign holidays and home heating methods. BP continued with business as usual, expanding their drilling operations right up to 2020. In August 2022, the company announced record quarterly profits of $8.45 billion(£6.9bn); in the same period, Shell posted record profits of $9.5 bn, a 26% increase on their previous record, set in the first quarter of the same year, and promising to pay out shareholder dividends totalling around $6.5 bn.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump was another devastating setback. Despite describing himself as “someone who cares deeply about the environment,” his administration overturned scores of domestic environmental regulations. Having once said that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in 2017, citing what he called “the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country” and saying that under his administration the US “[would] continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on earth,” a bold statement of mind-melting doublethink for a man running a country responsible for around 14% of global carbon emissions, second only to China in the league table of the world’s biggest polluters.

The day I began drafting this piece was the hottest day ever seen in the UK, with Conigsby in Lincolnshire recording a high of 40.3 degrees Celsius, the first time a temperature of over 40 degrees had been measured in this country; data from the BBC showed that thirty three other locations had recorded temperatures in advance of the previous record of 38.7 degrees, which was set in 2019. Wildfires caused by the intense heat erupted, including in the outer London borough of Havering, where residents of the village of Wennington were forced to flee from a blaze that engulfed forty hectares of grassland, igniting garages and farm buildings, and destroying two streets of terraced houses in the process.

The Yorkshire Post website showed a video shot East Ardsley, Leeds, in which people can be seen walking across a barren stretch of grassland while a wild inferno rages in the distance, plumes of smoke and ash spewing into an eerie grey sky, images that instantly brought to mind stills from the film of Cormac McCarthy’s classic post-extinction event novel The Road. The same newspaper reported that over 60 homes nationally had been destroyed and that 15 fire services had declared Major Incidents as they struggled to cope with the scale and intensity of the fires. On the same day, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss began their face-off in the race to become the new leader of the Conservative party and de facto Prime Minister of England. Despite the carnage caused by the heatwave neither candidate has had much to say on the subject of climate change, although Liz Truss has spoken of a move to temporarily scrap the Green Levy, which funds a number of environmental projects, and later told Tory party members she wanted to “exploit all of the gas in the North sea,” hardly an expression of progressive ecological thinking.

The UK wasn’t alone. In Europe, tens of thousands of hectares of tinderbox dry land was consumed by flames, and 238 deaths from the heat were reported in Portugal alone. Greece and France were also badly affected, as was Spain, where my folks, on holiday in Torremolinos, witnessed a fire in the hills so intense my mam told me on the phone that it looked like a volcano was erupting; in Italy, a state of emergency was declared in the Po Valley, where the country’s longest river has all-but dried up.

In 2020, the Met Office produced a temperature map of the UK, imagining what a summer heatwave may look like in the year 2050, with temperatures of forty degrees plus in the south and in the very high 30s just about everywhere else. As the heatwave ravaged the UK, some observers were quick to point out that the temperature maps that were being shown on current forecasts were virtually identical to the predictions for 2050, suggesting that the world was warming up quicker than we thought.

Atmospheric scientist Doctor Simon Lee, posting on Twitter, was quick to point out that “I don’t think you can interpret this as climate change occurring ‘faster than anticipated’. Climate models have shown that 40C is possible in the UK in the current climate, just very rare. My point is that what is coming on Tuesday gives an insight into the future[…..] 40C represents a new extreme, which is becoming more likely due to climate change […..] Both the 2050 and 2022 forecasts are showing extreme events, but 40C in the 2050 forecast is less extreme than 40C in 2022.”

However you choose to interpret it, the signs are ominous. In the Paris Agreement representatives from 196 countries agreed to work together to limit a global rise in temperatures to well below 2C and preferably below 1.5C compared to pre-Industrial times. In the year the agreement was signed, forecasts showed that there was virtually a 0% chance of the 1.5C limit being breached for the first time within five years; by 2020 this figure had jumped to 20%, which increased again in 2021 to 40%. Earlier this year, a report published by the World Meteorological Organisation said that the likelihood of the limit being surpassed in the next five years is now 50%, and that it is 93% certain that one of the years between now and 2026 will become the hottest year on record globally.

According to the head of the WMO, Professor Petteri Taalas “The 1.5C figure […..] is an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet. For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise […..] and our weather will become more extreme.”

Professor Taalas also says the earth is currently on track to see a global temperature rise of between 2 and 3C against pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, which would mean the planet becoming as warm as it was three million years ago, when life on earth in all its forms looked very different to how it does now.

A 3C increase doesn’t sound like much, but the effects would be catastrophic. Hundreds of millions of people would be displaced by coastal areas being submerged as glaciers melt and sea levels rise; intense heat and wildfires would devastate the bits of the globe that aren’t submerged; crop-raising would be made impossible by constant droughts; fish stocks would die off as ocean temperatures rise and the global ecosystem would collapse as plants and animals, unable to cope with the new norm, die, breaking food chains at every link; socio-political infrastructures would lay in tatters as they’re unprepared to deal with the changing circumstances; wars could be fought over fresh water. It sounds like a nightmare confluence of two Ballardian dystopias – The Drowned World and The Drought – and yet if nothing changes, that’s exactly where we could end up.

This outlook is corroborated by the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in August 2021. 234 scientists studied 14,000 research papers and their findings were stark. They stated that for the decade 2011 – 2020, “temperatures […..] exceed[ed] those of the most recent multi-century warming event 6500 years ago.” The same report also says that there has been a 40% decrease in Arctic sea ice since 1979, and that atmospheric concentration of key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is at its highest level for two million years, having risen by 50% in the last 200 years alone.

Sonam P Wangdi, chair of the group that represents the 46 least developed countries – those who will bear the brunt of the worst of the effects of global warming and include Afghanistan, Haiti, Zambia and Rwanda, (which was recently selected as a location to send people trying to claim political asylum in the UK, despite its atrocious human rights record) – responded to the report by saying, “This confirms that the global efforts to address climate change do not reflect the scale of the crisis we are facing.”

It’s an assessment with which it is very difficult to argue.

*****

In my younger years, I swore I’d never have children. If you’d asked me why, I’d have said I was too busy living my own life to want to be responsible for someone else’s, and besides, who would want to bring children into a world as fucked up as this one? People speak about the gift of life, but it didn’t seem very much like a gift to me, and I was determined not to inflict it on anyone. But as usual, life had other plans, and the schoolboy we met at the start of this piece has now grown into a forty one year old man with two kids of his own, including an identikit blonde-haired, blue-eyed, butter-wouldn’t-melt boy of nine – a real Mini-Me. He’s precocious, like his dad was, sensitive to the troubles of an increasingly scary world around him and keen for reassurance that everything will be okay.

The last few years have been unimaginably hard for children; they’ve lived in fear of a virus that even adults have been running scared of, and have had to endure two years of lockdowns, losing valuable learning time, but, more importantly, missing out on a lot of crucial personal and social development. As far as the kids are concerned, the pandemic is over, but hot on the heels of that came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; then the playground was full of talk of World War Three and nuclear holocaust, the prospect of planetary inferno for man-made reasons of an altogether different kind. For days my son was pensive, withdrawn, prone to bursting into tears without apparent reason. Whenever my wife and I asked what was wrong, all he could say was, Russia……before dissolving into sobs again. We reassured him as best we could, told him that the war was far away and that it wouldn’t reach us here, that everyone was doing what they can to make it stop, and this placated him enough to keep him going until the war was normalised to the point that the kids at school stopped talking about it and it was all-but forgotten. But as parents, what do we do when our children ask about climate change?

In the innocent world of the 1980s, reassurances were much easier to come by. Kindly Mr Mason, a teacher I look back on with a huge amount of fondness and respect – was so engaging that he almost turned it into a game; Teamwork! We can do it! Recycle! Go green! And to the thirty kids of eight and nine years in his charge, this was enough. The power to change the world was in our hands, as long as we were willing to do something about it, and man, we were certainly glad to help. But the harsh realities of 2022 don’t allow for such easy answers. When my boy asks about the future, I don’t know what to say. Greta Thunberg’s justification for mobilising the youth against climate change was simple: if things don’t change, there will be no future because “[their] future was sold so that a small amount of people could make an unimaginable amount of money.” And she’s right. But how can I tell him that?

It’s a bleak outlook, especially when you consider that the two biggest polluters on the planet – China and the US – have little interest in changing the status quo, continuing to do nothing while the petrodollars roll right in. As Thunberg herself said as a sixteen year old, addressing the UN, “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?”

It’s a horrifying thing to think, but for people my age, our children could be the parents of the Last Generation. If they go on to have children of their own, they will be destined to be around middle age when the calendar flips to 2100, by which time the planet has a more than even chance of being completely, irretrievably fucked, human civilisation reverting to a kind of atavism we can barely imagine.

Worst of all, how do I tell him that it could have been stopped, that we were warned, repeatedly, of what was to come, and still left ourselves to walk into the apocalypse with our eyes wide open? As The Archivist – Pete Postlethwaite, playing the last surviving member of the human race, looking back at global climate change from the year 2050 when the world is almost at an end, - says in Franny Armstrong’s 2009 climate change docu-drama The Age Of Stupid, “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we could? What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?”

The answer is that I can’t. And so my wife and I tell him that the future is a long way away, and that he needn’t worry about it now; that he should recycle, and give to charity, donate to foodbanks and buy second hand things where he can; we try to raise him and his little sister, still blissfully unaware of the impending threat, to live as ethically as our social and financial circumstances allow, guilty conscience partly salved by knowing we’re doing our bit, yet undermined by the knowledge that none of it matters, because those with the agency to drive change are happy to get richer and see the ruination of the planet as nothing more than collateral damage. When I speak to him about the future, I talk about tomorrow, or the day after, maybe next week, or even next year, but no further than that. It’s better to remain silent than add more lies to the pile.

Some say that climate change is killing the planet, but it isn’t. It’s killing life on the planet, and that’s not the same thing. One of the great follies of the anthropocentrism that dogs so much human thought is that we as a species are special, unique - omnipotent gods in a world of dumb animals. We can’t imagine the world without us, therefore if we die, the earth dies. Stands to reason, right?

Wrong.

The planet isn’t dying; in fact, the planet will be fine. Imagine the earth as a person, and global warming as a fever caused by a viral infection - humans. As the influential scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, who died aged 103 on the day the UK’s temperature records were smashed, wrote, “The Earth has recovered after fevers like this, and there are no grounds for thinking that what we are doing will destroy Gaia […..] What we are doing weakens her but is unlikely to destroy her. She has survived numerous catastrophes in her three billion years or more of life.”

Even without human and animal life as we know it, life, in some form will go on. Whatever microbes, bacteria, single-celled organisms, proteins and amino acids are left will endure, and over aeons of Deep Time, evolution will start all over again as they begin to recombine in totally different ways. New forms of life will develop that are inconceivable to human minds. But whatever life evolves, and whatever path it follows, surely it will be impossible for another species to emerge that could ever inflict as much damage to the earth as we have.