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When the Met Office predicted a ‘barbecue summer’ this year they were giving a hostage to fortune, and reality has visited savage retribution on them. If the public were sceptical about the ability of scientists to warn us about climate change before this debacle, they are now downright scornful.
The climate seems to be as unpredictable as it ever it was, but the natural progression of the seasons is not so capricious, nor are computer models required to tell us what is in store. As the gradual – or occasionally dramatic – warming of spring leads into the holiday season, our expectations – or hopes at least – grow ever more optimistic; will this be one of those truly memorable summers? And later, as the days begin to shorten noticeably, and leaves turn from rich green to brown, we know that soon the trees will once again be bare poles outlined against a cold sky, with morning frosts and the chance of a flurry of sleet or snow in a passing shower not too far away. Then, as the cold months near their end, the first signs of growth in sheltered spots reassures us that the whole cycle will start again.
There is a point in the passage of the seasons that always makes a deep impression on me, and that is the very earliest signs of autumn, because these occur while it is still summer. The first intimation is a glimpse of a mountain ash with its brilliant orange berries blazing against a background of drab green foliage. Nature is preparing for the onslaught that is to come, even if the calendar tells us that we are only in early August. The second sign is more subtle, and always comes as a surprise.
A few mornings ago I set out early and hurriedly to start a long journey, but as I headed from my front door to the car I stopped in my tracks. There was a nip in the damp air, almost a hint of frost, and also the heavy scent of mature foliage that is becoming senescent*. The first time that I notice this is, for me, the moment that the transition from summer to autumn begins, in the very middle of the holiday season. And I remember that we are already a long way past the longest day too. There may be many warm days to come, but this year’s summer is beginning to fade.
I live quite close to Portmeirion, the ‘Italian’ village that the architect Clough Williams-Ellis recreated on the shore of a beautiful Welsh estuary. It’s an enchanting spot nestling at the foot of a sheltered, heavily wooded valley with panoramic views across the water – or, depending on the state of the tide, seemingly endless pale golden sand – to distant pastures speckled with grazing sheep, backed by mountains and moorland. Not surprisingly it is visited by vast numbers of tourists during the summer.
There is one detail that very few of these summer visitors notice. At the edge of the central piazza, with its formal garden, reflecting pool, and trellises, there is a stone pillar with a rather strange metal construction on top of it, which catches the fleeting attention of passers-by. But if they look more closely, they will notice there are some inscriptions carved into the stone. This is the Summer Time Monument.
Williams-Ellis was born and bred in North Wales, and although his profession required him to spend much time in other places, it is undoubtedly where he preferred to be. So he was well aware of the fickleness of Welsh weather, and its limitless potential to disappoint. He evidently treasured the rare summers that fulfil our fantasies of what this season is really supposed to be, but unlike those of us who merely store such experiences away in our memory, to be the subject of debate as to which year it was when we wore shorts and ate meals outside from March right through until October, he did something more positive. Each time during his very long life that such a summer occurred, he got his stonemasons to inscribe the year on the memorial so that it would always be remembered.
It is a horrible reflection on the age we now live in that a warm bright summer is no longer entirely an occasion for innocent celebration, to be savoured and revelled in for all the pleasures that fine weather can bring. Such rare and welcome events are now portrayed as symptom of anthropogenic climate change.
Well the year 2009 has shown no sign of producing a candidate for immortality at Portmeirion, and nor is it likely to do so now.
* The condition or process of deterioration with age.
Even in London it’s possible to detect the earliest moments of the shift from summer to autumn. Today was very nice and warm here in the southeast, but the early mornings seem slightly cooler now. Later there will be more subtle changes – the air starts to take on a different smell, as you’ve mentioned, and the sun’s light will become a little softer and more diffuse.
It’s when the michaelmas daisies start to appear that I really know that autumn has arrived. That and the fact that the surviving garden spiders in our front garden will have become rather large.
I agree about the demonisation of our warm, bright summers (when they occur.) Today was lovely here, a proper hot and drowsy summer afternoon (I had a half day off work and was able to enjoy it.) Steady sunshine, blue skies, the distant chimes of an ice-cream van… Very nice indeed.
Alex:
But I wonder how many people under, say, forty years of age, still notice such things? Or even think very much about the seasons in any way other than the extent to which they affect leisure activities?
Observing the natural world seems to have become optional. Experienceing it vicariously through the media, and particularly documentaries, seems to be the norm. And that means that younger people no longer have personal experience against which to measure what they are told about the climate. Even the life-giving warmth of the sun is routinely portrayed as a malign influence that gives us skin cancer and may destroy the biosphere.
Tony, two factors that I think might be contributing to the younger generation’s becoming out of touch with the natural world (in many urban or suburban areas, at least) are 1) indoor entertainment, such as TV, games consoles and the internet becoming ever more prolific, and 2) the perception that to be outdoors is to be in peril, whether it be from gangs, paedophiles or dangerous dogs. I seem to remember doing lots of tree-climbing, den-building and long bicycle rides (e.g., Norwich to Thetford and back) when I was a kid, without either myself or my parents thinking much about the possible dangers, or health and safety issues; there were only three TV channels, no satellite, no cable, no VCRs, no computers and no internet, so I’d usually be indoors reading a book if the weather was bad, or outdoors on my bike if it was sunny. The UK has become a far more media-saturated place since the 1960s and 1970s, but has it become much more dangerous? I’m yet to be convinced that it has.
Re the changing seasons, it will be interesting to see what happens to people’s perceptions if we start to have some colder 1960s-style winters again. We all remember the winters of our childhood, and I can recall more than a few winters where there was thick snow on the ground, which lingered for more than just a couple of days. Those British people in their adulthood now who are worried about global warming will surely have compared their childhood memories of cold winters with recent memories of mild, rainy winters during the late 1990s and the 2000s. However, youngsters growing up now may consider the warmer years as being “normal”, so if there are a string of cooler years in the pipeline, their experience will start to run counter to the received wisdom. But who knows, really; it could go either way!
Alex
In 1977 George Steiner, writing in The Listener, suggested that change in man’s attitude to the natural world was ‘the most important revolution of feeling since the Second World War’.
We are now experiencing the continuation of that revolution, not least in the AGW controversy. The belief that humans could control the climate would have seemed ludicrous to the majority of people even thirty years ago, and indeed warnings at that time that we were on the brink of a new Ice Age never gained credence. Few people now experience the natural world as part of their everyday lives; most only do so for recreational purposes or vicariously through what they read, see on television or are taught by others whose knowledge is theoretical rather than practical.
It is this transition, the inability to see human existence within the context of the natural world rather than from the viewpoint of a superspecies that is independent of its processes, that attracted George Steiner’s attention. I am not aware that he ever returned to this theme, but if he did it would be very interesting to know what he had to say a decade or two later.
TonyN
Your link to the 1977 writing of George Steiner regarding the “change in man’s attitude to the natural world” is interesting, and I would agree with your observation that “we are now experiencing the continuation of that revolution, not least in the AGW controversy”.
After reading Peter Taylor’s book, “Chill – A reassessment of global warming theory”. I think it even goes a step further than the “belief that humans could control the climate”, as you put it.
Under the heading “Climate as enemy”, Taylor writes (p.361):
“It is striking that a small group of men working behind computer screens created a virtual reality in which future climate became the enemy of mankind. That original cabal was likely innocent of any underhand motivation and genuinely believed mankind faced a threat and that they would sound the alert and potentially stave off disaster. But sociologists will go a little bit further and look at the social environment that spawned the very concepts of the climate game, many of which we take entirely for granted. For example, the notion that humanity itself can be under threat or that the planet might need to be saved. These are very recent notions, at least from a societal perspective, and do not bear closer scientific scrutiny. My sense is that they have more in common with previous religious notions of an apocalypse but without the aspects of divine judgment. Instead, humanity judges itself and projects its own demise, with the ecological feedback system becoming the instrument of retribution.”
We are living in strange times, indeed.
Max
Max:
See also Robin’s guest post here:
Obama adviser: how to become a climate extremist
Sunstein’s paper takes a slightly different line which is nevertheless complementary to what Taylor says. I am very impressed by what you’ve said about this book and it looks as though I’m going to have to invest.
Incidentally the context from which both Taylor and Sunstein are speaking is also intersting; one a career environmentalist, the other President Obama’s regulation csar.
Hulme has spoken of the need to involve social scientists in the climate debate, even at IPCC level, but for very different reasons. I think that from a climate scientist’s point of view that might not be welcome; a bit like giving your dentist a great big smile when you meet him socially.
Tony, Max, good comments and links, and I can see I’ve some catching up to do on my reading – Steiner, Taylor, Sunstein, etc. Also I like the dentist analogy.
It has struck me that the greens also put stress on the modern generation lacking connection (and thus needing to reconnect) with the natural world. Via Google Books I’ve been dipping into The Light-Green Society by history professor Michael Bess, about environmentalism in France since the 1960s.
One passage which I think sums up the green philosophy (or a core aspect of it, anyway): “…a highly idealised image of nature prevailed – a nature imbued with its own extremely complex meta-equilibrium, which had established itself over the course of eons, and which greedy humans had lost sight of and were now dangerously disrupting. The ideology of “less is more”, if earnestly and systematically applied, was supposed to restore the lost balance, both for humans in their perceived quality of life, and for nature in its return to a robust and healthy condition.”
I’m wondering whether the main difference between the above position and your own, Tony, is the difference between a landscape where humans are at worst aliens and at best are absent or have a minimal presence (the “low impact” concept, which is ironical, given the enthusiasm among many greens for intrusive windfarms), and a landscape where humans have had an important and a shaping presence but where a kind of forgetfulness has set in and nature in recent times has increasingly become to be perceived wrongly either as a victim of human nastiness and/or a monster (the “revenge of Gaia” idea.) I’m not sure if I’ve made much sense here, and it may be I’ve generalised or am on the wrong tack.
On the “climate as enemy” theme, I happened to watch the BBC’s 10 o’clock news yesterday, which had an item on the “perfect storm” in 2030 created by a combination of climate change, overpopulation, urbanisation, demand for energy and food/water shortages (as far as I can see, they are recycling a news story from about five months ago relating to John Beddington’s warnings at the SDUK 09 conference.) Just a thought – if people are increasingly finding the idea of CO2 mitigation expensive and unnecessary, I’m wondering whether this is a way to make it appear more palatable and necessary, by mixing it up with solutions to other, more credible threats? Like getting a dog to swallow a pill by wrapping it up in bacon, as it were.
Alex
I think that you are right in what you say, and in quoting Bess. Environmentalism has long been an urban-based movement that relies on an idealised, even romantic, view of the natural world. At times I am reminded of the 18th C aristocrats who liked to play at being farmers or milkmaids, just so long as they didn’t have to live in the way that their tenants and employees did. In our own times environmentalism is inclined to be a middle class pursuit; the product of affluence and security in the same way that hypochondria is a complaint that afflicts the healthy.
That is not to say that there are not very real problems with pollution and the preservation of some areas from unnecessary exploitation or industrialisation, and we should be addressing these. I am talking about proselytising environmentalism as a lifestyle, and in its more extreme political manifestations. One of the sad consequences of AGW hysteria is that the focus has shifted away from the very obvious and necessary things that we could, and should, be doing to prevent unnecessary degradation of our habitats and the larger world around us.
The dichotomy between a vulnerable natural world that is at our mercy, and one that is vengeful, is also a shrewd observation, and an example of the inconsistency of the virtual natural world that is being conjured up to support the militant environmentalist’s philosophy.
So far as the landscape is concerned, I would like a pound for every time I have seen an earnest environmentalists eyebrows shoot up in disbelief when I’ve suggested that, in the UK at least, our beautiful landscape is almost entirely man-made – apart from geological features – and that it is the product of thousands of years of ruthless exploitation in order to provide the necessities of life. I think it was Hoskins in ‘The Making of the English Landscape’ who identified the age of the great park creators and landscape architects of the 18th C as the only period in our history during which there has been any conscious attempt to beautify the countryside.
We seem to have lost the knack of exploiting the countryside without industrialising it and making it ugly, Wind turbines, urban sprawl and motorways are not things of beauty. It seems to me that it is essential that, so far as possible, we preserve what is left before it is too late, because we can never recreate it, in the same way that we cannot recreate a gothic cathedral.