Climate change worries

 A prolonged spell of settled weather is hanging over Britain. In London, where not a drop of rain has fallen in four weeks, and where no rain is forecast for the next two weeks, I am a) enjoying the sunshine but b) increasingly worried about climate change. I cannot remember from my childhood or youth - including the summer of 1976 - any major moorland fires like the ones at Saddleworth and Bolton right now. And the hottest June ever in the UK was... last June.

Watching a BBC2 documentary last night about the Russian Far East, the effects of climate change on reindeer populations, the gigantic sink holes opening up as permafrost melts and the massive release of methane - a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide - and the deforestation of an area larger than Amazonia - filled me with pessimism. Maybe we are too late to slow down and stop climate change. Maybe it is accelerating. If the world's temperature were to increase by four degrees Celsius by the end of this century (a 93% chance according to this report from the Carnegie Institution for Science) where will it be by the end of the next century? How long before mankind bakes itself to death? How will evolution - where hundreds or thousands of generations are need to adapt to environmental conditions - cope with the speed of change?

We are short-termist in our outlook. Instant gratification is what we crave. The consequences are all around us, lives wrecked by the mad rush for what it is that brings immediate pleasure. And laziness; drive rather than walk; drive rather than travel with others; eating cheese in ready-to-serve slices, each separated from the next by plastic film because its easier than slicing it ourselves.

The reindeer of Siberia are starving to death in winter because rain falling (instead of snow) onto icy ground freezes hard and the animals cannot get to the lichen underneath that forms their staple diet at that time of year. The herders are leaving their traditional pastures, seeking new forms of employment. When the BBC filmed illegal logging going on in Siberia, it was the crew that was arrested and deported, not the illegal loggers. What chance have we of saving our planet when venal thieves are focused on short-term gain?

It is pleasant to stroll around Ealing in the sunshine, but at the back of my mind the worry, the guilt, the association with fellow humans who haven't yet seen it coming. They, who laugh and say "cluck cluck the sky is falling" (as in the tale of Chicken Licken); they who persist in use of over-sized fossil-fuel guzzling vehicles and other forms of egregious behaviour in face of climate change.

Below: my childhood Ealing did not look like this. The crystalline skies that impressed Sir John Betjeman in Australia on his first visit, the ones he said were never like that over England, are now indeed here.

Environmentally, I am an illiberal. I'd welcome far more drastic measures against those who spoil the planet in which my children will grow old... what will their grandchildren inherit from us, here, today?

We are more than meat robots in an accidental universe. We have been so immeasurably gifted to be here, alive, today, conscious, observing our world, full of wonder, and yet our short-term dash for convenience and pleasure and wealth is leading to consequences future generations may not be able to deal with.

This time last year:
Jeziorki hatchling update

This time two years ago:
Brexit: where next for mankind?

This time three years ago:
Three hundred kilometres in a suburban train

This time five years ago:
Serious cycling

This time sevenyears ago:
Outlets for creativity

This time nine years ago:
The day I stopped commuting to work by car

This time ten years ago:
Look up at the Towers of London

This time 11 years ago:
Wild deer in the Las Kabacki forest