Well, they are not prepared, that is the point and whilst they have been busy polluting our rivers, they have not built a reservoir for many years whilst population increases and our lifestyles demand more and more water per household.
This is now apparently the driest spring for almost 70 years (1956), and a high-level meeting between Ministers, water companies and others took place last week, with another scheduled for July (!) as things get serious. Last year was exceptionally wet (apparently due to climate change) and this year it is exceptionally dry (apparently due to climate change), as we are told that we are drier than Sydney, Istanbul, Dallas or Marrakesh. Well, that is very interesting, but what are the plans?
We need to reduce customer usage, is the answer given. The only answer which they have, given that leaks in the systems continue and no extra storage capacity has been built. Other experts say that a drought is a possibility, although no area is in drought yet. Expert opinion goes on to tell us that sustained rainfall, such as last seen in 2012, will be needed to remove the threat of a drought this year. We could not possibly have worked that out for ourselves, but we now know that we are in trouble.
The government meeting was told that farmers had been largely unscathed by the dry conditions, due to cold temperatures not promoting crop growth. Well, that’s OK then, but its been pretty warm here in the southeast and I would suggest that most farmers have noticed the dry conditions affecting growth, and the NFU put out a statement that crops are beginning to fail. I don’t know about you, but I am confused.
Farmers and growers are adapting as our climate warms which has already spawned a booming wine industry, now its citrus and olive oil that are being looked at. Gardeners on the Isle of Wight have planted the first outdoor grove after 15 years of experimenting which also includes melons. Apples which need cold weather may become harder to grow, they say, and could be replaced by citrus as things warm up. The 22-acre garden grows fruiting olives outdoors, and date palms as they look to bananas and avocados.
Meanwhile a proposal for giant greenhouses in Essex are looking to greatly lessen our dependence on Spanish tomatoes. Our high gas prices and cheap imports have greatly disadvantaged British horticulture, and we now only grow 13% of our annual consumption in the UK. Most fresh tomatoes are imported from Spain, Morocco and the Netherlands, and should a Valencia storm hit Almeria, 55,000 Hectares of polytunnels would be wiped out. Not everyone is happy about the proposed plan, with a local Green councillor who is opposed to such a big development. This government’s push on development, coupled with anxiety to repair frayed relationships with farmers should help push it through.
Baroness (Minette) Batters former President of the NFU has stated that farmers should earn more from producing food, than they do from green subsidies. This is her first statement since being appointed by the government to lead a review of farm profitability. She is urging Ministers to review the balance between profit from growing food and payments for environmental initiatives such as rewilding or hosting solar panels. She is right of course, as farmers have been urged to diversify for decades in order to prop up the low margins of food production.
The madness of rewilding and the staggering amount of public money that has gone into allowing food production to be replaced by what many farmers would call abandonment is madness. Making statements and urging Ministers is one thing, whether Minette and her team can come up with solutions to low margins on food production is quite another. She has already criticised supermarkets for paying too little, and just as important, taking far too long to pay farmers. Retailers must be held more accountable she says.
There are some interesting blue-sky projects (excuse the pun) being discussed by scientists, in the hope of halting climate change. The government is to invest £10 million on refreezing the Arctic, by pumping seawater onto the surface in winter. This is one of 21 geo-engineering projects, which include the feasibility of building a giant parasol in space to shade a portion of the planet, another is to look at thinning high-altitude cirrus clouds that act as heat-trapping blankets. Another is to dim the sun by introducing aerosol particles high in the stratosphere.
These are the sort of initiatives, one of which may work rather better than Ed Milliband’s plan of making us all very much poorer for no gain, globally. Net Zero, his pet project is now in real trouble, we all know that, even if some will not admit it. The Hornsea 4 wind farm expansion in the North Sea fell apart last week as it no longer made financial sense, according to the developer. The very idea that we will buy no more petrol cars and almost no fossil fuel energy by 2030 is for the birds.
We could all support a more rational programme, showing global leadership and would still get us to our goal a little later without destroying great chunks of the economy. Unfortunately, we live in a world where fanatics hold sway, in one direction followed by a swing, with fanatics who take us in the other direction likely take control.
The idiots who cut down the Sycamore gap tree look likely to serve a custodial sentence which may be longer than should they have committed a far more serious crime, due to the public outcry and our very odd way of valuing things these days. I have no sympathy for them, and I do realise that it was an UNESCO world heritage site, but it was a tree after all; one tree. The reason I raise this, is that whilst it was a very important tree, visited by thousands, it had no tree preservation order on it. Why?
However, when I read that the CAVAT valuation placed on the tree is/was £622,000 I did have to sit down! CAVAT works apparently by calculating a unit value for each square centimetre of a tree stem, by extrapolation from the average cost of a range of planted trees. It is a method favoured by tree officers (!) to quantify the monetary value of amenity trees in towns and cities. There seems to be a hidden industry here and no doubt the cost of it will get Nigel Farage and his merry men very excited about the waste of money involved. The quick method of calculating a CAVAT value, is to use the stem diameter of a tree in order to calculate the surface area of the cross-section of the trunk and then factor in the remaining ‘Safe Life Expectancy’ (SLE). You then need the ‘Functional Value’ of the tree (as assessed by a surveyor), which then enables you to somehow arrive at the monetary value of the tree; £622,000 in this case which seems a tad high.