It’s been a scary time with heat and wildfires. After I published my last post the whole of Wales was announced to be in drought as well as half of England. We’ve had wildfires the length and breadth of Britain, many of which are on the west of Britain which ordinarily gets a lot of rain and is full of temperate rain forests. Where I am in the West Midlands the parks and common lands are full of cracks severing the ground, everything is crispy underfoot. Most mature trees are coping but newly planted woodland has mostly died off – when the council and charities plant (much needed) new woodland we need some sort of community grey water scheme to help the plants through their first couple of years.
Blackberries fruited very early (not a good sign) but are plentiful so birds can at least make good use of them. We had 40 mins of rain on 30th July which I was thankful for, and the sky tried today but no more than a couple of spots hit the ground. That’s it. Wild sources of nectar for insects must be in short supply at this point.
I keep my nectar rich plants watered at the allotment plot and have bird baths filled with water here there and everywhere with pebbles as insect perches. The pond gets topped up periodically too. I have deep hedgerows and stick and log piles all over the place for shade. Every little helps.
At the allotment site our badger population hasn’t been seen this year which has allowed hedgehogs to move into the area (badgers eat hedgehogs so they don’t cohabit the same location). With the ground being so hard and the worms long retreated to cooler deeper soils it’s no wonder the badgers wouldn’t find enough food on site or the nearby woods. But not too far away are council-run golf courses, which have permission to continue to water their grass through drought. And so I hope very much our badgers have moved on to pastures green(s) and are making extra holes across the fairways.
So all in all it’s been very worrying, both for people’s immediate health as well as yet another warning shot of the future to come without tackling the causes of climate change. We’re in an El Niño year but global temperatures are rising year on year anyhow. And even when we do wrangle in fossil fuel consumption and deforestation (and I have to believe we will) the effects of climate change will continue for generations afterwards before stabilising.
Most of us in the UK got a government issued “severe alert” this evening, a broadcast message that sends a high pitch siren noise and text based message displayed on the lock screen of mobile phones. The message is no outdoor fires in our current tinderbox environment, which should be obvious to anyone and yet many of the recent fires have been started by disposable BBQ trays and fireworks.
If you need to opt out of UK government alerts on a safety phone or otherwise follow the instructions here.
I’ve been frustrated by comparisons with the climate of the USA and their ways to cope with heat (especially around air conditioning) given they are approaching 4.4% of global population but use 17% of the world’s energy. The European Union by comparison has 6% of the world’s population and uses 10.4% of the world’s energy. Both the USA and the European Union hold 15% each of global GDP, if that means anything (A USA environmental footprint factsheet 2022, University of Michigan). Much of how people live in the USA is not sustainable and should be seen as non-replicable.
If we’re to widely install air-con systems in Britain we need to maximise our renewable energy sources first and build the capacity of the national grid to sustain the up tick in energy consumption which will come with air-con use. Widespread air-con for hot weeks would be useful alongside other measures, but it alone won’t fix that we live in largely old housing stock that is designed to withstand cold and rain. A hot dry environment is alien to us. Retrofitting homes and urban landscapes, installing heat pumps and solar panels, tackling nation wide water mismanagement, rebuilding wild habitat, reducing reliance on oil (including fuel and plastics), reducing gas consumption, rethinking how and on what we use our energy. There’s many more things to be done.
In cold hard fact our current situation is deeply depressing but there is always hope. Right now I mostly feel the bodily heat exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I’ve been getting migraines all week. But as soon as we get proper rain I’ll be outside dancing.
