Monday was one of the hottest days ever recorded in Ireland.
remained indoors most of the day — happy to toil in my home office and avoid the UV rays that, if exposed to, would only turn my receding head a darker shade of beetroot.
Earlier this year, I had my home’s cavity walls and roofspace insulated. The Christmas tree will no longer go up there in the new year as the rolled out insulation sits so high above the joists.
I found the insulation a blessing this week because just as it is great at keeping the heat in during the winter, it also keeps the higher temperatures out during the summer, slowing down the transfer of heat.
The NI Sustainable Energy Programme is an £8m fund collected from electricity customers via a public service obligation.
Couples, single parents and pensioners on incomes of less than £40,000 can avail of free insulation and energy system replacement provided they meet the further criteria of one of the numerous schemes listed.
It is well worth checking out and I’ve referred many friends and family to it in recent years that have had boilers replaced and lofts and walls insulated for free.
However, I remain puzzled as to why funding such as this to insulate homes is not part of a more ambitious multi-million-pound government scheme to reduce our dependency on oil and gas and to lessen our exposure to global price fluctuations.
In terms of climate change, it’s one of the low hanging fruits of policy change, but time and again even small schemes of this nature are scrapped.
We now have a large stock of leaky homes. We pay through the nose to pump heat through them every year but like colanders, the warmth quickly exits through the holes in the walls, the roof and the windows. Children’s food budgets for the week are cut back in many households because the heat has to go on for an extra hour or two in the winter. An unnecessary and preventable contributor to poverty.
Stormont was abuzz with talk about a Green New Deal when it was first mooted some 15 years ago. That opportunity was squandered, and many households are now paying the price of our failure to insulate for times like these and we will see the full impact of that this winter.
With temperatures set to increase in coming years, perhaps more quickly than we expect, insulated homes will become more important in keeping vulnerable people cool and safe in the summer.
-The record breaking temperatures in the south of England show us that some of the most frightening impacts of climate change (so far) are now on our front doorstep.
In recent years, we usually expected to see television images of wildfires engulfing residential areas in places like California or Greece. Now they are just 300 miles away in London where firefighters had their busiest day since the Second World War.
More than 1,000 deaths were attributed to the recent heat in Spain and Portugal, where it reached a torturous 47C.
The UN secretary general António Guterres said on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.
“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
Weeks like these should be a wake-up call for those that want to slow down the battle to keep global temperatures down. It threatens our agriculture, our global food supplies and our existence as a species if we don’t start to radically change how we live our lives.
There are idiots that would walk us all over this cliff to global catastrophe. They will ignore the scientific evidence and say, ‘sure it’s only a bit of warm weather’ or they will tell you it’s all a ‘big scam’.
More dangerous again are those who agree that there is climate change but will then argue against taking meaningful action, slow emissions reductions down, and then point to other countries and say, ‘sure they’re not doing anything, why should we?’
We heard some concerning comments from Tory leadership candidates about the UK’s net zero policies in recent weeks, but we haven’t heard any this week. I wonder why?
Carbon intensive industries, even now, are fighting to delay decarbonisation of national economies. Let’s pour fuel on the flames of climate breakdown for just a few more years. If people in power continue to placate these industries (to retain or gain further power) then we have no hope.
The speed of climate change is quickening. This week’s weather was remarkably similar to a mock-up weather forecast that the UK meteorological office did for 2050 just two years ago. That scares me and it should scare you too.
When our young children are our age, this week’s heat will seem cool. We face into a dangerous future, but we can prevent that future from being apocalyptic if we act now.
Climate fear and anxiety is on the rise mainly among our youth, but not exclusively.
I worry about what state this place is going to be in when I reach my 60th birthday in 2042.
We need to act on that fear and anxiety and organise to prevent the future that is being forecast. If we don’t then our lives are going to get much worse — perhaps sooner than we previously expected.
