The heatwave we’ve all been waiting for is better than you thought

HERE’S a surprise. Britain and Ireland are going to be sitting pretty as a result of climate change. According to Marek Kohn, our two nations may soon be envied by most of the rest of the world, with the possible exception of New Zealand.

“There will be heatwaves and floods, for sure,” he acknowledges, “but nothing to compare with the kind of shocks that will hit Spain, half of which could become semi-desert, let alone Bengal.”

Increased warmth will reverse centuries-long patterns of agriculture, tourism and migration, he suggests. The southern counties of both countries will be covered in vineyards, turning us into major wine-producers. Holiday-making patterns of generations will be turned upside down, with tourists flocking northwards, rather than southwards, in order to relish warmth but not intolerable heat, to see greenery, as opposed to parched brown soil. Rich Europeans will buy second homes in Ireland in order to get away from the scorching conditions in their own countries. Natives, using the English phrase which gives Kohn his book title, may murmur that, far from climate change being disastrous for everybody, it actually “Turned Out Nice”.

When it hits public opinion, climate change data has tended to have two effects: paralyse and polarise. The information and argument from authoritative sources has paralysed many people with its enormity and apparent immutability of consequence. But it has also polarised public argument, with those who follow the Al Gore line of thought expressing public contempt for those who do not accept it, characterising them as “deniers”.

Nor are these extreme reactions confined to climatologists. If you’re an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to saving the planet, your enthusiasm can close your mind: whenever someone appears on radio talking about world needing more nuclear power stations and arguing that they are less dangerous to the environment than coal-burning, my mind closes down. It’s a case of ‘never mind the data, stick with the prejudice’.

Marek Kohn, a popular science writer, has found a clever way to cut through the paralysis and polarisation of the climate change discourse by coming at the topic tangentially. He decided to take a new slant on the subject by visiting a number of key sites in Britain and Ireland to examine the effects, good and bad, those sites might experience before the end of the century if the world continues its “business as usual” approach.

Kohn’s genius at making the complex simple allows him to present an accessible, engaging examination of a topic which, paradoxically, has been rendered inaccessible and opaque by the sheer vastness of the available information. By picking out identifiable areas like the Burren and Scottish highlands, Kohn brings the topic to a level at which consequences can be imagined: if all politics is local, all climate change is even more local.

Using such locations allows Kohn to do much than the predictable catastrophising, although he does enough of that to confirm any environmental paranoiac. The difference is that his thesis is blissfully short of computer models. It does, however, still envisage half of the south of Britain as likely to go underwater, creating new islands and burying villages, Atlantis-style. He regards it as inevitable that disease-carrying bugs currently deterred by the relative cold will come flocking into Ireland and Britain, bringing malaria and a host of other ailments. In social terms, he points to the likelihood that, because large parts of the world, particularly Africa and Greece, may become uninhabitable as a result of climate change, the level of migration could be unprecedented, helping to bring Ireland’s population back to pre-Famine levels.

Kohn forces the reader to question the assumptions on which their thinking is built. The notion of conservation is simplistically appealing, as is, for example, the action of forestry conservationists in pulling up forestry roads in order to discourage large numbers of visitors whose very presence may adversely affect the mountainy woodlands of Scotland. According to Kohn, a new threat hangs over the trees currently doing reasonably well in the Highlands of Scotland.

“Fires break out more easily in the drier summers, spreading underground through the peat. Dousing them would take effort,” he points out. “The obstacle is philosophical. Does the principle of letting nature take its course extend to spontaneous burning? Fires are more frequent nowadays, and the increase is attributed to climate change, but how can one say that climate change is the cause of any particular fire? While conservationists wrestle with these questions, the fires are left to burn themselves out.”

Transpose that into the Irish countryside and it’s obvious that as they dry out, peat bogs become more flammable. Once a fire takes hold in a bog, it is notoriously difficult to extinguish, spreading and smouldering over a huge acreage and releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. One of the reasons the EU demands that the harvesting of turf from many of Ireland’s raised bogs must cease is that cutting out such bogs removes an internationally valuable carbon sink. A drier climate could turn a carbon sink into a powerful carbon delivery system, posing the unexpected challenge of keeping the bogs wet at a time when we’re running out of water; it isn’t enough to simply stop cutting turf.

Turned Out Nice is full of examples of the nuanced possibilities offered to these islands by climate change. Undoubtedly one of the most readable on the topic, it may also be the most important contributor to debate since it makes the reader think, not just about the physical changes climate change will bring about, but the way it may alter our relationship with the rest of Europe.