Home ›› 22 Jul 2022 ›› Editorial
Last week, as the mercury started to rise in the UK, and sober weather-watchers warned that, for the first time ever, temperatures might reach 40°C in the UK, the default position of TV’s weathermen and women was to talk of records being broken, as though extreme heat was some kind of Olympic sporting event, and the plucky British weather was some sort of super-athlete, whose ‘achievement’ was to be celebrated.
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing to celebrate about temperatures reaching 40°C in the UK, as was recognised when Grahame Madge, a spokesman for the Met Office, said, “We’ve just issued a red warning for extreme heat for Monday and Tuesday which is the first such warning ever issued. The warning covers an area from London up to Manchester and then up to the Vale of York. This is potentially a very serious situation.”
While the news triggered widespread warnings about the impact of the heatwave on people’s health, almost none of the coverage focused on the underlying reasons for the heatwave, and it was only the severity of the forecast that, for a few days at least, stopped tabloid newspapers from running the ‘Scorchio’ headlines that they usually resort to when summer heat hits the UK. Perhaps they had finally recognised the severity of the situation via a comment by Penny Endersby, the chief executive of the Met Office, who said, “Here in the UK we’re used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun. This is not that sort of weather.”
Yesterday, however, The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid rag of hatred and denial, brought even that temporary break to an end with the tagline, ’It’s Super Scorchio’, and the headline ‘Hotter than the Sahara’, irresponsibly superimposed on a photo of a beach full of people frying in the sun.
While the media are to blame for not having generally taken increasing temperatures seriously enough over the last two decades, it should be noted that they are also reflecting a long-held British belief that heatwaves are unarguably a good thing, a pay-off for us having to ‘endure’ cold weather, rain and that bane of Britishness — regularly overcast skies — for so much of the year.
However, when the heat becomes homicidal — and astute climate campaigners point out that current temperatures are already close to temperatures that, just a few years ago, we were warned of as what we should expect by 2050, if urgent action to tackle our greenhouse gas emissions is not undertaken — alarm bells ought to start ringing, with a ferocity that we have never previously had to acknowledge.
And yet life continues largely as normal. Cars and lorries still choke the roads, at the weekend another massive cruise ship was moored in Greenwich, and the obsessive consumer distractions of everyday life continue as though there is nothing to worry about.
At some level, most of us know that this is no ordinary heatwave, and know that the alarm bells are ringing, so how do we explain our paralysis?
Beyond the scenario outlined above, another reason for inaction would seem to be that no one wants to be — or likes — a ‘downer.’ People in general, it seems to me, want to ‘look on the bright side’, and are largely averse to doom-mongers in their midst. This has probably always been a helpful social mechanism, but in recent decades it has been deliberately fostered by the cheerleaders for rampant consumerism, who have actively sought to make people self-obsessed, and with a sense of extraordinary entitlement that has eroded our ability to properly comprehend and respond to the climate crisis — the sense of entitlement regarding driving, flying and supporting ‘fast fashion’ being relevant examples.
Added to this, the neoliberal machine of contemporary existence has also infiltrated the world of psychology, suggesting that anger — at official indifference to the scale of the climate crisis, for example — is a sign of some sort of maladjusted personality, rather than a logical conclusion reached by examining the state of the world objectively.
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