into the north and west of the British Isles to keep pace with the shifting climatic zones. Many butterflies and birds are already doing this: the speckled wood butterfly has moved north by over a hundred kilometres in the last sixty years – and it’s still lagging behind current rates of climate change.28 The nuthatch, a colourful tree-dwelling bird, is now extending its range, and the reed warbler has begun for the first time to breed regularly in Scotland and Ireland.29
But whilst birds and butterflies are clearly fairly mobile, most tree species are not. At the end of the last Ice Age trees could colonise new areas at a speed of up to a kilometre a year, by spreading their seeds and gradually establishing new saplings. But projected warming rates will far outstrip this: climatic zones in the twenty-first century will be shifting north seven times faster than most plant species can follow them.30
There are also some serious practical reasons why natural ecosystems can’t simply move with a shifting climate, such as cities, enormous dead zones of intensive farmland and major roads. The great crested newt, for example, couldn’t move north even if it wanted to – it can’t cross the M4 motorway.31 Nor are my local beechwoods likely to be able to get round Birmingham and Manchester in their supposed long trek north.
Extinction is a certainty for highly-specialised plants and animals which already live in very restricted areas. Norwegian mugwort, a plant which lives only in the Arctic cold of the highest Scottish mountain summits, simply has nowhere higher to go. Nor has the capercaillie, the emblematic Scottish bird which lives in pinewoods and is similarly dependent on low temperatures for its survival. Also on the way out is the natterjack toad – which according to a government study is due to lose its ‘climate space’ as early as 2020, when the seasonal ponds it breeds in dry out. The mountain ringlet butterfly will lose its climate space by 2050, and it too is slated for extinction.32
As with the National Trust’s gardens, climate change will ruin British nature conservation strategies, which are currently based around a patchwork of Sites of Special Scientific Interest and nature reserves. Almost all of these are adapted to specialised habitat – such as upland peatbogs, chalk grasslands or lowland heaths – which depend on particular rocks, soil and topography and therefore, by definition, cannot be moved.
Ecosystems are incredibly complex, with many different species occupying their own niche in the food web. Once these begin to fracture, specialised species will die out in all but the most tiny remnant habitats, to be replaced by only a few highly-adaptable weeds. Biodiversity will decline as these adaptable species, many of them invasive introductions from other parts of the world, take over ever-larger areas of our outdoors.
The British countryside of 2080 is likely to be an eerie, unnerving place, with the same familiar rolling landscape supporting only a few very mobile – but strangely unfamiliar – plants and animals.
Like the Christmas snow, the holly and the ivy may soon be distant memories.
Yet none of this has to happen, or at least not to the extent I’ve outlined above. Some amount of warming is already inevitable, but whether it reaches the extremes described above depends on all of us – and the decisions we take about how to run our lives and our economy. It depends crucially on one thing, and one thing only: how much greenhouse gas we release into the atmosphere over the decades ahead.
On the way back from Wales, I got caught in a traffic jam on the M6 just outside Birmingham. This one was a monster. Three lanes of cars, vans and lorries were packed solid. The whole place stank of petrol and diesel fumes, aggravated by a few irritated motorists who revved their engines pointlessly. A few drivers even got out and stood next to their vehicles, glaring at everyone else, looking for someone to blame. No one spoke. There was none of the camaraderie you often get on a broken-down bus or a delayed train. This was an atomising, frustrating experience. We were all trapped like prisoners in our little metal boxes, and every one of us hated it.
Despite jams and congestion, road traffic in Britain is rising inexorably. Every year Britons spend more time and travel greater distances in their cars. An increasing number of short journeys – under two miles in length, which could easily be done on foot or by bicycle – are now done in cars. Road-traffic levels rose by a fifth between 1988 and 1998, and are predicted to rise by nearly another two-thirds by 2031. Journeys by bicycle, meanwhile, are at an all-time low.33
In many ways car use is a self-reinforcing process. When I was young most children used to walk to school or go by bus. Now – partly because of parental fears about busy roads – the ‘school run’ has become one of the biggest causes of urban congestion. It causes gridlock every morning around eight on many of the roads near where I live. It’s a vicious circle: the more parents who take their kids to school by car, the more cars on the road and the more dangerous the roads become for everyone else, forcing still more parents to resort to their cars. And so it goes on.
Similarly, the growth of out-of-town shopping has encouraged car use, putting town centre shops out of business and reducing the places one can shop without going in the car still further. By building new roads and supporting the growth of supermarkets the government has made matters worse – but we’ve all been complicit in these destructive trends.
And most people with cars can scarcely envisage living any other way. When the RAC recently asked motorists if they agreed with the statement: ‘I would find it very difficult to adjust my lifestyle to being without a car’, 89% said that they did.34
Nor can those of us who have given up our cars – but still, like me, regularly travel by jet aircraft – afford to be smug. A single short-haul flight produces as much carbon dioxide as the average motorist gets through in a year. The flights I undertook to research this book directly produced over fifteen tonnes of carbon dioxide35 – which is equivalent to about forty-five tonnes once the overall warming effect of aviation pollution is taken into account.36 Many people who work for environmental organisations travel enormous distances by plane every year – each with similarly valid reasons for doing so as I felt I had. Speaking personally, the impact of these flights is so enormous that it wipes out all the other aspects of my relatively green lifestyle (no car, green electricity, local food and so on) and is equivalent to my total sustainable personal carbon budget for about twenty years.37 Oh dear.
Although cars are a highly visible pollution source, and transport accounts for a third of the average person’s greenhouse gas emissions, another third comes from the home – over 50% of this from space heating.38 With some insulation, a new boiler and some double glazing, heating costs and the associated emissions could be reduced dramatically – yet most of us don’t bother, or simply can’t afford to do so. Over a tenth of British houses have no insulation at all,39 and 20,000 to 40,000 people – mainly the old and vulnerable – die every year because of cold-related killers like hypothermia and pneumonia.40 As well as reducing climate change, better housing and insulation would save lives.
The other third of the average person’s emissions comes from everything else – food, services and other consumer products, all of which generate pollution in their manufacture and transport. Many people now eat food from all over the world without even knowing it: green beans from Kenya join Chilean apples and Brazilian chicken on the average British dinner table. All these products – especially fresh fruit and vegetables, which mainly come by air – generate huge pollution costs as they are transported. None of that, of course, appears on the label. Nor, incidentally,