‘We Can’t Trust the Weather Any More’: My Speech at ‘The Big One’, Extinction Rebellion’s Four-Day Protest in London

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On April 21, the first day of ‘The Big One’, Extinction Rebellion’s four days of arrest-free, family-friendly protest in Westminster, backed by over 200 other organisations — which I wrote about enthusiastically here, while berating the mainstream media for not taking the climate crisis seriously enough — I also made my first ever public speech about the already unfolding climate catastrophe.

I delivered my speech, written the night before, to a crowd of about a hundred people outside 55-57 Tufton Street, which I described in my article about ‘The Big One’ as being “home to a number of opaquely-funded right-wing ‘libertarian’ think-tanks that are actively committed to maintaining the murderous status quo, defending unfettered big business, and denying the reality of catastrophic climate change.”

Earlier, XR Writers Rebel had held a prominent event featuring Ben Okri, Zadie Smith and many other writers, which was followed by a kind of open mic session, where I followed a great performance by the West Country political collective Seize the Day, who first emerged from the road protest movement of the 1990s.

Despite having been a public speaker for over 20 years, and having spent the last 17 years, whenever possible, discussing Guantánamo unscripted, in great detail and with controlled passion, I was somewhat taken aback by how emotional it was for me to make a speech for the first time about the climate crisis — no doubt because of its pressing urgency, with nothing less at stake than our continued existence on the planet.

I drew on my fears regarding the changing weather, drawn from my observations over the last year or so, but also quoting from Bill McKibben’s first book, ’The End of Nature’, published in 1989, which I had recently been re-reading as part of a series of articles reflecting on my recent 60th birthday, and the ways in which climate change has been perceived since the early 1960s. Entitled, ’From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change’, Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

Unfortunately, no one filmed my speech, but some of those who heard it confirmed that they found it very moving, so I’m posting the text of it below, although I’m aware that reading it won’t capture the tremulous urgency and wave of emotions that I felt when reading it out. I hope to have many more opportunities to speak out about the climate crisis in the months to come.

We can’t trust the weather any more
By Andy Worthington

Every day I wake up with trepidation, pull back my curtains and wonder what the weather will be like, what mutated version of nature will confront me.

Of course, the weather in England has always been variable. With reference to the whole of north-western Europe, the Köppen-Geiger climate classification system describes the UK as a country with “a humid temperate oceanic climate”, one “dominated all year round by the polar front, leading to changeable, often overcast weather. Summers are mild due to cool ocean currents. Winters are milder than other climates in similar latitudes, but usually very cloudy, and frequently wet.”

That description sums up the climate I grew up with, which seemed somehow static and unchangeable, but it is not the climate that greets me now. Of course, the seasons continue to change, and it is now spring, so that new growth is sprouting everywhere, but it no longer feels like the same planet I grew up on. It no longer is the same planet I grew up on.

For weeks now — months, even — the winds have been strong and unfamiliar, and the overcast skies have been ominous and threatening. You might say that I’m imagining it, but I know I’m not. I’ve spent the last eleven years cycling every day, so I know what the weather is, what the weather was, and I know that this is not ‘normal.’ It is Frankenstein weather — not, for the most part, devastating our ability to live, as it already is in so many parts of the world — but a mutated version of what our senses and our memories tell us the weather should be.

Soon, perhaps, the heat will come — the heat that, in 2020, made lockdown tolerable for those who chose to gather in our parks, but that, last summer, led to unprecedented temperatures of 40°C. I was out on my bike on those two extremely hot days in July, when I felt something I had never felt before — the heat on my eyeballs as though I was standing in front of a just-opened oven door.

Nor did it end in July. On Hallowe’en, October 31st, I was with my wife in Sandgate, east of Folkestone, walking by the sea on a day that was so hot that we were shedding clothes as though it was the height of summer. It was, as with those insanely hot days in July, as though we were in Andalucia in August. Cycling in London on those 40-degree days, I was aware that most people were indoors, understanding first-hand why siestas were a part of Mediterranean life. Feeling something similar on Hallowe’en, however, was almost impossible to absorb. And yet still, as we saw locals greeting one another, the familiar cries rang out, echoes of an old world resorted to, reflexively, even though we were all now standing in a furnace.

“Lovely weather”, they shouted to each other, smiling.

I was recently reminded of how the weather is no longer what it was, how we can no longer trust it, and how we have, so perilously, mutated it, when I was re-reading ‘The End of Nature’ by Bill McKibben, which was published in 1989, when I was just 26, and Bill was just 28.

Speculating on a heatwave in London, Bill’s words eerily captured what, 34 years later, those 40°C days were like last summer.

“[I]f, in July, there’s a heat wave in London”, he wrote, “it won’t be a natural phenomenon. It will be a man-made phenomenon — an amplification of what nature intended, or a total invention. or it might be a man-made phenomenon, which amounts to the same thing. The storm that could have snapped the hot spell may never form, or may veer off in some other direction — not by the laws of nature but by the laws of nature as rewritten by man. If the sun feels sweet on the back of your neck, well, that’s fine, but it isn’t nature. What has happened is the extinction of summer and its replacement with something else that will be called “summer.” This new summer will retain some the season’s relative characteristics — it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and it will be the time of year when crops grow — but it will not be summer, just as the best prosthesis is not a leg. Those ‘record highs’ and ‘record lows’ that the weathermen are always talking about are meaningless now. They imply a connection between the past and the present which doesn’t exist.”

Bill’s book freaked me out when I was 26, but I understand it now. We have each come to understand the crisis we face in many different ways. For me, it came with the IPCC’s warning, five years ago, that we only had until 2030 to cut global emissions of greenhouse gases sufficiently to keep alive the dream of a 1.5°C temperature rise since the start of the Industrial Age. In just five short years, that timeline already appears lost. Changes forecast for the 2030s or 2040s are happening now, and, to be honest, I dread what the summer might bring.

I’m sure many of you here today — perhaps most of you — share my realisation that we can’t trust the weather any more. I also know that many more people who aren’t here also feel the same, and we desperately need them to join us to demand unprecedented changes to our destructive way of life. As Bill McKibben also wrote 34 years ago, with reference to the ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, “the changes are irrevocable. They are not possibilities. They cannot be wished away, and they cannot be legislated away.”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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