Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.
Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.
If that sounds unnatural, it is. This weather does not belong in the safe, predictable, home counties of England. At least, not in a normal state of affairs.
But ever-greater combustion of fossil fuels has turned the world’s climate on its head. In the past week, the northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins.
The leafy suburb of Woburn in Bedfordshire, for example, was drenched in a sky dump of more than 100mm (3.9in) of rain on Sunday, a month’s worth of rain in a day. That’s a downpour worthy of the height of the rainy season in my Amazonian home of Altamira, where I have lived for the past three years.
It felt similar too – thick dark clouds, brief intense bursts, drainage systems instantly overloaded – as I walked home on Monday evening through the avenues of Barnet. This weather doesn’t belong here, I thought.
Yet nowhere can rely on familiar patterns of rain or shine any more. That is also true of the Brazilian rainforest, which is alarmingly starved of precipitation.
Stretches of the Amazon River have dried up in the midst of a protracted drought over the past year or more. Desiccated vegetation has created tinder-like conditions. Neighbours back home send me messages warning of fires that creep closer to our community. It is a similar story in the Pantanal region, the world’s largest tropical wetland, and in the Cerrado savanna. Last week, more than 60% of Brazil was enveloped in smoke.
The messed-up mess we call a climate becomes more deadly every day in ever-wider swathes of the world. In the past week, floods have killed at least 384 people in Myanmar, 21 in central Europe, 10 in Morocco and six in Japan.
Social media timelines are filled with anomalous mobile phone photographs of torrents of water flowing in all the wrong places: the Sahara in north Africa, the streets of Cannes in the French Riviera, and through road tunnels under railway bridges in Slough, England.
The latter brought to mind the opening lines of John Betjeman’s 1937 poem, Slough, which decried the unthinkingly grim expansion of industrial parks, air conditioning and labour-saving homes in the run-up to the second world war:
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
We now live in a different time with a different threat. But there is the same sense that industrial society is inviting its own destruction.
The climate “bombs” that rain down on today’s world are less targeted but far more explosive. Since 1971, scientists say human-caused global heating has trapped the equivalent of 380 zettajoules of energy in the Earth system, which is 25bn times the power of the “Little Boy” atomic weapon that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. This accumulation of energy, which causes more intense storms, heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts, continues to mushroom because carbon emissions continue to rise.
The impacts have long been felt in places such as Altamira and elsewhere in the global south, which are less responsible for this manufactured calamity but more vulnerable to its effects. Now, after two years of record global heat, even the wealthier, guiltier parts of the world are no longer protected by concrete walls and air-conditioned environments.
Suburban floods, floating Ford Fiestas, cancelled football games and other disruptions to humdrum routines are only just beginning for the middle-class in rich countries.
Will it make a difference to public opinion and government policy? I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it. What is aberrant today may once again be normalised a year or two from now, further postponing the eradication of fossil fuels and forest burning, further turning the world upside down, further widening the gap between the global north and south, and making it ever stranger and more difficult for everyone to come home.
