From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change — Part Two: The 1980s
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
This is the second of what will be four articles looking at how awareness of the climate crisis has developed, and been supported, ignored or resisted, over the last 60 years. I’m writing these articles to reflect on my 60th birthday, which somehow ambushed me at the end of February. The first part, covering the 1960s and 1970s, is here.
When the 1980s began, I was in a good place personally. 16 going on 17, freed from the bullying, insecure tribalism of the mid-teenage years, and also freed from the plate-spinning requirements of the ‘O’ level syllabus, which, then as now, essentially required everyone to demonstrate competence in maths, science, languages and the humanities, I was free to specialise for my ‘A’ levels — in English, History and French — which I took to with enthusiasm, helped by some genuinely inspiring teachers, not least my English teacher, Mr. King, who took us on theatre trips across the country, which, in particular, vividly brought Shakespeare to life.
I also started going to gigs, in those fascinating years of post-punk experimentalism and the rise of Two-Tone, got a girlfriend, published a fanzine, became a singer in a band, began watching arthouse films, and generally found life full of fascinating possibilities.
Politically, the situation was far different. The rise of Margaret Thatcher cast a cloud over life in general, as she began her malignant mission of de-industrialising the nation to break the power of the unions, and privatising everything in sight.
David Attenborough’s ‘Saving the Wild Isles’: A Powerful Message, But Urgent Concerted Direct Action Is Still Overwhelmingly Needed
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Last night, after watching the fifth and final episode of David Attenborough’s ‘Wild Isles’ series on BBC1, a three-year project that has provided a beautifully filmed and visually unprecedented perspective on the extraordinary wildlife of the UK, I watched the online-only extra episode, ’Saving the Wild Isles’, which, we heard last month, was only being shown on iPlayer “because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press”, as the Guardian explained.
In the end, the programme failed to present what we had been led to expect — “images of rivers polluted with plastics, sewage and pesticides, tales of dwindling numbers of insects, birds and mammals, of ancient woodlands destroyed, overfished seas, mature urban trees felled, meadows ploughed, raptors such as golden eagles poisoned, the climate crisis running amok”, as Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, explained in a critical article for the Guardian today, entitled, ‘David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV — it doesn’t go far enough.’
Instead, ’Saving the Wild Isles’ was an uplifting endorsement of ‘rewilding’, focusing on important efforts across the country by farmers, ecologists and volunteers to undo the worst effects of industrial, pesticide-driven agriculture, to ‘rewild’ denuded nature (with a particular focus on the Cairngorms), and to re-plant vital, wildlife-supporting sea meadows on the ravaged ocean floor. For Londoners, there was even a focus on the inspiring work restoring nature to the River Lea at Cody Dock, a formerly heavily polluted industrial site in Canning Town, which everyone in the capital should visit.
The IPCC’s “Final Warning”: Only Rapid, Deep and Immediate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts Can “Secure a Liveable and Sustainable Future For All”
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
On Monday, the frenetic gossipy world of nonsense and distraction that, rather sadly and shamefully, constitutes most of what passes for news and culture these days paused for a moment to reflect upon the publication of the most significant document that will be published this year — the latest climate change report prepared by the climate scientists of the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the United Nations body founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide “regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
This latest report — rather functionally known as the ‘AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023’ — is the final outcome of the IPCC’s sixth reporting period, which began in 2017, and which synthesises the findings of three working group reports, published in 2021 and 2022, as well as three special reports, published in 2018 and 2019.
The IPCC’s latest report establishes, as its ‘Headline Statements’ summary states, that “Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health”, and that “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
‘Frankham Walk’: Peabody’s Cynical Rebranding of the Destroyed Old Tidemill Garden Site in Deptford
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
So finally, Peabody, the charitable housing association turned private developer, has rebranded the destroyed Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden site in Deptford, and the ‘regenerated’ old Tidemill primary school next door, as ‘Frankham Walk’, featuring, as its advertising hoardings show, “Your dream home” — if your dream home consists of a 1, 2, 3 or 4-bedroom apartment, a duplex or a townhouse for private sale or shared ownership, with private sales for 1 to 3-bedroom flats ranging in price from £337,500 to £690,000, and with shared ownership deals ranging from £84,375 to £172,500 for a 25% share, plus monthly rent and service charges.
There are, or will be 144 properties in total in ’Frankham Walk’ — 51 for private sale, 14 for shared ownership, and 79 that, we are told, will be “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list.” A further 65 properties — 27 for shared ownership, and 38 “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list” — will, we are also told, follow when 2-30a Reginald Road, an existing block of 16 structurally sound council flats, is demolished and replaced with new housing.
The name ‘Frankham Walk’ was probably arrived at after the longest deliberations in the history of 21st century ‘regeneration’ projects, because of the contentious nature of the development, which involved the two-month occupation of the garden by campaigners, to try to prevent its destruction, its violent eviction by bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council, and millions of pounds spent by the council guarding the empty school and the destroyed garden.
From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change — Part One: The 1960s and 1970s
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
This is the first of what will be four articles looking at how awareness of the climate crisis has developed, and been supported, ignored or resisted, over the last 60 years. I’m writing these articles to reflect on my 60th birthday, at the end of February. The second part, covering the 1980s, is here.
60 years ago, as my poor mum grew ever larger, carrying what would be her only child — me — the UK experienced its coldest winter since records began. The Big Freeze began on December 12-13, 1962, and by December 29-30, when my mum was seven months pregnant, the snow lay nine inches deep in Wythenshawe, south of Manchester, and just a few miles south east of where my parents lived, in Sale.
In January, the upper reaches of the River Thames froze, and at Herne Bay, in Kent, the sea froze for a mile from the shoreline. By February, when I was born, storms reached Gale Force 8 on the Beaufort scale, and a 36-hour blizzard “caused heavy drifting snow in most parts of the country”, reaching 20 feet in some areas, as “gale-force winds reached up to 81 miles per hour.” Many parts of the country were swathed in snow for two months continuously, and it was not until March 6, when I was six days old, that the Great Freeze came to an end.
The discovery of “global warming”, from the 1820s to the 1960s
It was difficult to think, back in 1963, that human activity was already contributing to an alarming increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it was indeed the case. Scientists had been investigating how the earth’s atmosphere functioned since the 1820s, when the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier suggested that the earth’s atmosphere might act as some kind of insulation system, making the planet warmer than it would otherwise have been if it was dependent solely on solar radiation.
Climate Change Heroes of 2022: António Guterres, Just Stop Oil, Greta Thunberg and Climate Scientists
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
As 2023 begins, with new January heat records already established over much of Europe, 2022 ought to be remembered as the year that the reality of catastrophic man-made climate change became undeniably apparent, along with the shocking realisation that the degeneration of a balanced atmosphere that is conducive to our continued existence is happening much quicker than expected.
It appears, however, that, despite unprecedented floods, wildfires and droughts, melting polar ice and glaciers, and temperature records being broken around the world (including, for the first time ever, 40°C in the UK), the momentum required to bring about urgent and necessary change to our suicidal economic systems simply doesn’t exist.
As the mainstream media fails to adequately convey the urgency of our plight, and most national politicians also fail to recognise that their only purpose now is to bring to an end the predatory and largely unfettered pursuit of profit that is already making even the short-term security of humanity appear unviable, confronting the crisis has been left to relative handful of people around the world — primarily, climate scientists and environmental activists.
Cop-Out at COP27: Still No Agreement to Even Reduce the Use of Fossil Fuels, As the 1.5°C Target for Global Temperature Rise Fades Away
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
It’s been a while since I last wrote about the most pressing crisis that any of us have faced in our lifetimes — the ever-increasing fossil fuel emissions that threaten the very viability of life on this extraordinary planet, where, uniquely in the universe, as far as we know, the chemical balance of the atmosphere has allowed an extraordinary abundance of life, including our own, to blossom over tens of millions of years (or, in our case, the last 300,000 years).
In summer, as, for two days, the UK baked in the hottest temperatures ever recorded, I wrote two articles, Our Climate Crisis Paralysis: How, in the Face of Unprecedented Signs of Climate Collapse, We’re Still Being Failed by Politicians, the Media and Ourselves, and “Human Kind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality”, Doing Nothing While the World Burns and Extinction Looms, in which I added my voice to the many other concerned global citizens trying to wake people up to the unique gravity of the crisis we face, whereby the emissions caused through our profligate use of fossil fuels are already beginning to turn the earth from a generally bountiful garden into somewhere inhospitable.
This year really ought to have been a wake-up call — not just because of 40 degree heat in the UK, but also because of similar record-breaking temperatures around the world, leading to rivers drying up, wildfires on an unprecedented scale, and widespread drought, which has involved vast areas of agricultural land being rendered useless.
From Tomorrow, 16 Days of Rebellion and Protest Against the UK Government — for the Climate, the Economy and Justice
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Over the last few weeks, much of London has been plastered with posters advertising the environmental protest group Just Stop OIl’s ‘Occupy Westminster’ protest, beginning on Oct 1. The timing could hardly have been better, as, since it was first announced many weeks ago, a new fossil fuel-loving, climate change-denying government has been put in place — elected by just 81,326 Tory Party members and with no mandate from the people of the UK — which has proceeded to refuse to levy windfall taxes on the energy companies’ vast and unearned recent and future profits (choosing instead to put the burden on taxpayers for an energy price cap that was required to save the country from economic collapse), has lifted the ban on fracking, and has promised to open the floodgates to new oil and gas extraction (as well as, most recently, crashing the UK economy in the most alarming manner via unjustifiable and fiscally deranged tax cuts for the rich).
Backed by the malevolent far-right ‘libertarian’ think-tanks based in Tufton Street, close to Parliament, including the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), described by climate researchers and environmental groups as “the UK’s most prominent source of climate denialism”, Truss’s government has no interest in investing in renewables, even though the majority of the British public backs new on- and off-shore wind power, solar power and wave power, rather than fossil fuels, and also has no interest in investing to insulate Britain’s leaky homes, even though it would vastly reduce our energy needs, and well as providing significant employment.
The occupation of Westminster begins tomorrow (October 1), with activists gathering first at Euston, Paddington and Waterloo stations at 11am, and then converging on Westminster, with the plan repeated on Sunday October 2 (when, incidentally, the Tories’ train wreck of a conference begins in Birmingham), and, from Monday October 3, moving to Whitehall, opposite 10 Downing Street at 11am every day.
Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2200) to Support My Work on Guantánamo, Climate Change and Malignant Politicians For the Next Three Months
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and my various other endeavours over the next three months.
Dear friends and supporters, and any kind passers-by,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work as a reader-funded independent journalist and campaigner, primarily in relation to the main thrust of my work over the last 16 and a half years — reporting on the US “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, and campaigning to get it closed, but also via my forays into other territory, especially the unparalleled, life-threatening severity of the climate crisis, which finally hit home in the UK this summer, and the ominous hijacking of the British government by a new leader, Liz Truss, chosen by just 0.0017% of the electorate, who has surrounded herself with dangerous far-right “libertarians.”
I also continue — again on an unpaid basis — to involve myself in housing issues in the UK, in chronicling London via my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and in making protest music.
I’m a week late in posting this fundraiser, which I delayed because of the ten-day period of mourning in the UK for the death of Queen Elizabeth II, which, extraordinarily, caused something close to a media blackout on any other news, in what should, with hindsight, be regarded as a shameful dereliction of duty by the mainstream media. I didn’t stop working throughout this period, of course, but now that normal life has resumed, I expect that the next few months will be very busy indeed, and your support will be very welcome.
“Human Kind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality”, Doing Nothing While the World Burns and Extinction Looms
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
It’s too hot.
Three weeks since the UK experienced its hottest weather ever, with temperatures hitting 40°C, it’s become clear that that was just a spike in a long hot summer in which, for the first time ever in my 37-year history of living in London, the weather has turned hostile.
“It’s just summer”, the right-wing tabloids and right-wing politicians say, as though it isn’t the hottest year on record, as though the ten hottest years on record haven’t all been since 2002, and as if temperatures exceeding 50°C in India and Pakistan, and exceeding 40°C in France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain are nothing to worry about.
We are led by liars, mostly in the service of the oil and gas companies who have been lying about the catastrophic impact of man-made climate change, through the profligate use of fossil fuels, ever since they first discovered the awful truth in the early 1980s. This took place though their own research, but they then deliberately suppressed it, as was recently spelled out, in agonising detail, in the BBC’s excellent three-part documentary series, ‘Big Oil v. the World.’
Who's still at Guantánamo?
