Climate change
| 1 | Climate change |
| 2 | Britain under attack |
| 3 | The better side of town |
| 4 | The great wildlife invasion |
| 5 | The north-south divide |
| 6 | SAD |
| 7 | Ugly Bug Ball |
On 10 August 2003, a momentous event occurred at Heathrow airport just outside London. There, a temperature of 37.9℃ was recorded. This may not look an especially significant figure to you, but to the British it had great psychological impact. This is because many of them still think in the old Fahrenheit scale — and 37.9℃ is 100.2℉. It was the first time in British history that the temperature had passed the 100℉ mark.
Since that day, temperatures of more than 100℉ have been recorded several times in several different places in Britain. People have become generally aware of climate change. In Britain, there seem to be three trends: (1) like the rest of Europe, temperatures are generally rising; (2) the difference between the warmer, drier south-east and the cooler, wetter north-west is becoming more pronounced; (3) extreme weather conditions are becoming more frequent — so perhaps the British will start to be more prepared for them!
Some people worry that Britain’s political sovereignty is in danger from the European Union and from Scottish and Welsh independence movements (see chapter 12). This may or may not be true. But what is certainly true is that Britain itself — the island — is in very real danger from the sea. For one thing, global warming means rising sea level everywhere, so that low-lying coastal areas are threatened. For another, the Atlantic waves which hit Britain’s north, west and south coasts are getting taller. This means they have more energy than before — energy with which to strip sand from beaches, undermine cliffs and damage coastal defences. Finally, the east coast, although safe from those Atlantic waves, is actually sinking anyway (as the south-east corner of Britain tilts downwards). Every year, little bits of it vanish into the North Sea. Sometimes the land slips away slowly. But at other times it slips away very dramatically (as when in 1992 the guests of the Holbeck hotel, built on a clifftop near Scarborough, had to leave their rooms in a hurry; the cliff was collapsing into the sea — and so was their hotel).
London is in special danger because it is also vulnerable to flooding through tidal surges along the River Thames. One flood in the seventeenth century left the Westminster area under nearly two metres of water. In 1953 a tidal surge killed 300 people in the Thames Estuary to the east of London. Realization of the scale of the disaster that would have been caused if this surge had reached London provoked the construction of the Thames Barrier, completed in 1983. Since then, it has been used to protect London from flooding an average of three times every year. It is widely thought that the Barrier will soon be inadequate. New defences are being considered.
In the industrial age, the air in Britain’s towns and cities used to be very polluted. And the prevailing winds throughout Britain are from the west. For these two reasons, the more desirable areas of the average British town or city were to the west of its centre. This probably explains why, even now, when industrial pollution is no longer a problem, it is the western suburbs of most towns and cities in Britain which are the richest.
In the last 50 years, a combination of the British preference for building outwards and intensive farming in the countryside has had a curious effect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people migrated to Britain’s towns and cities. The British changed into a nation of urban dwellers. More recently, British animals have been doing the same thing! And for much the same reason. It’s all about where you can make a living. In the countryside, decades of intensive farming and monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop over a large area) have led to food shortages for many species. But all those back gardens, lanes and parks in Britain’s towns and suburbs are not farmed this way. There, a wide and tempting variety of flora and fauna is to be found. For all those starving rural animals, it’s too good an opportunity to miss.
The pioneers were the foxes. They started in the 1950s and have become mainly urban animals. Many other species have followed. Shrews, squirrels, roe deer and brown hares have all been spotted in cities and many more have colonized suburban back gardens. As more species take this route, more ‘employment’ becomes available for other species there. It’s a mass migration. Some wildlife experts believe suburban gardens are now so important to wildlife they should be classified as a special type of habitat.
In 1854, a novel called North and South appeared. It tells the story of a woman from the south of England who finds herself living in the horrors of the grim north of England. Since around that time, the ‘north-south divide’ has been part of English folklore. It denotes a supposed big difference between the poor north and the rich south (although there is no recognized geographical boundary between the two). Historically, there is much truth in this generalization. The south has almost always had lower rates of unemployment and more expensive houses. This is especially true of the south-eastern area surrounding London. (This area is sometimes referred to as ‘the Home Counties’, an indication, perhaps, of London’s domination of public life.)
So well-known are these stereotypes that statisticians and economists sometimes attempt to draw the boundary between north and south based purely on wealth, so that a relatively poor place is designated ‘north’ (and vice versa) because of this fact alone.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the decline of heavy industry, which was mostly confined to the north, caused large-scale migration of well-qualified workers from north to south, so that the north-south divide seemed to be getting even wider.
However, the picture now is not that simple. Net migration in this century has been the other way around — towards the north — and some of the poorest areas in the country are actually in London. Indeed, one well-known (northern) journalist has claimed that if the same kind of novel were written today the big divide would be between London and the rest of England — and London would be the awful half!
Aberdeen, on the east coast of Scotland, has done well out of North Sea oil. But its people have a problem in the winter. They are nearly 60 degrees north and on top of that, almost the whole city is built in granite, a grey stone which just soaks up the little light available. And it is this lack of light (not the cold wind) which researchers blame for depression in the city. They estimate that as many as 20% of the people there suffer from a condition known as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), some of them so seriously that they become suicidal.
In fact, SAD has increased all over Britain in the past two decades. Changed living and working patterns mean that people spend far less time outdoors than they used to, and so experience less daylight than they used to.
One small indication of the generally benign nature of British geography is the fact that even the mosquitoes are relatively harmless — almost nobody bothers to take precautions against their bites.
There is, however, a notable exception in one part of Britain — the Scottish Highlands. This is the territory of a cousin of the mosquito, the midgie (some people say ‘midge’). Midgies are much, much smaller than mosquitoes. But they are fiercer and there are many, many more of them, usually in ‘clouds’ around your head!
Midgies make picnics in the highlands a gamble, camping uncomfortable and outdoor cocktails impossible. You know the image of the British always moaning about the weather. Well, Highlanders are always moaning about the midgies. Recently, one group of Highlanders decided to abandon the struggle and celebrate instead. They held the world’s first midgie festival, including an Ugly Bug Ball, a ‘midge-summer night’s party’ featuring a mardi-gras style procession with midgie masks. The organizers claimed that, in their tenacious single-mindedness (when they go after you, they get you), midgies were ‘a brilliant symbol for our country (Scotland)’.
