Extinction weather

I took this photo from the top of Greenwich Park in London two days ago, looking down on a desert where once was grass.

It was the first time, for many long weeks, that I had felt able to go on an hours-long bike ride in the daytime — because the temperature was in the mid-20s, and there was a breeze.

Most of this summer, as one heatwave has bled into another, I’ve barely been able to leave the house, so oppressive has been the heat, and the humidity that has gone along with it. Repeated sweltering days of temperatures over 30°C, or, even if in the mid to high 20s, still of oven-like ferocity.

I know what I’m talking about, by the way. For over a decade, throughout my 50s, I cycled in London on a daily basis, taking photos for The State of London, a photo-journalism project that I started in May 2012, and for which I published photos and essays on Facebook every day (and latterly every two days) from May 2017 to December 2023 (see the link below).

Apart from when I was away for work on or holiday, I was out on my bike every day — for over 3,000 days in total, covering tens of thousands of miles and taking tens of thousands of photos — during the decade when extreme summer heat went from being a rarity to becoming steadily a much more regular occurrence.

Deeply suntanned but undeterred, I cycled every day throughout those summers, often for long distances across the 241 square miles and the 120 geographical postcodes of the London Postal District.

By 2022, however, it had become impossible to do so anymore.

That was the summer that a temperature of 40°C was first recorded in London, when, on largely deserted streets, I cycled down to Deptford and recalled how, for the first time in my life, I felt the heat on my eyeballs as though I had just opened the door of a furnace.

Today, the temperature reached 37°C, and cycling in the direct heat was almost as unbearable.

In the years since 2022, we haven’t had heat like this until this summer, when the sustained accumulation of heat — and, crucially, the lack of any rain whatsoever, with threatens both our food and water supplies, neither of which we can live without — has been much more severe.

In the years between, however, the weather has noticeably changed, and on a permanent basis. We largely avoided hot summers, but only because we were trapped instead in a low-pressure dome that was more tolerable, but no more “normal” than the heatwaves. Winters too have become difficult — dark, often cold and rainy, and more so than what we have experienced to date as “normal.”

This is climate change, climate collapse; not the illusion of a brave new world of “global warming” that the sun-starved celebrate, without paying any attention to the havoc that ensues when there is no rain, and the land burns dry, and the general reliability of the climate has been irretrievably lost.

Will we do anything about it? It seems not. Those with the greatest power and responsibility to effect change — the government and the mainstream media — are still as paralyzed as they have been through the 21st century, as the warnings of climate scientists have increasingly come true, but, in recent years, with impacts that are happening much quicker and with greater severity than all but the most prescient realized.

No one is coming to help us. Media gatekeepers, claiming that they don’t want to induce panic, or who don’t want to take any steps to entice audiences for whom climate collapse is too depressing, and not “sexy”, like it was briefly in 2018 and 2019, won’t take the lead, and nor will the politicians, who are also desperate to avoid panic, but are also completely impotent because of 40 years of neoliberalism, which they have obediently absorbed along with its key messages that only “the market” can provide solutions, and that the role of government is merely to seek out private companies to profit from every aspect of our lives.

Neither politicians or the mainstream media seem able to grasp that, through our addiction to fossil fuels, we are waging war on a liveable climate — a war of our own making, and which we are doomed to lose unless we abandon our addictions immediately, and start using our powerful brains to work out how to pour our energies into mitigation and survival.

None of them seem to understand that this isn’t a problem that can be ducked, or denied, or voted out, or avoided, or run away from.

We either act now — and I mean now — or we accept that our addiction to burning and consuming is going to make life unliveable for us all, not in some far distant future — in the 2030 or the 2040s — but before we even reach the end of this decade.