I will be making my way across London today to the Westmorland Hospital (part of UCL) to divine what is wrong with my body that I am wrapped up by pain. It may be that I emerge without tubes sticking out of me as is the case at the moment.
It is April and it should be a moderate temperature in which to travel. It is however promising to be 29 degrees centigrade outside and I am thinking hard what to work to cover up my support mechanisms without over-dressing for a summer heatwave.
You might ask why this is worthy of the blog but it is happening on the day when Baroness Brown publishes a parliamentary report on our responsiveness to climate change. In case no one noticed it follows a total power cut in Spain and Portugal this week and is not far behind Valencia’s disaster last year.
The report is freely available and I include it here. The link is here
The report’s finding are across a variety of sectors. Some – like the economy- show a higher degree of readiness but not so the health sector
I do not want to make a coincidence into a story but I fear that my trip to hospital in an April heatwave is a metaphor for the problem facing our lack of preparedness.
As I have mentioned many times over the past six months, I find the attitude of NHS medical staff to be outstanding but a comment that was made to me by someone to whom I was talking after a five month wait for an initial assessment made it clear the internal frustration
“that’s the NHS for you”
We need to recognise that the world is changing, we cannot stop climate change – it is too late, we have to find ways to live with it. Here is Tony Blair yesterday
In its report The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, external, the Tony Blair Institute argues that global institutions such as COP and the UN have failed to make sufficient progress in halting climate change.
At the same time, it argues, the public have lost faith in climate policies because the promised green jobs and economic growth have failed to materialise, thanks in part to global instability and the Covid pandemic.
Writing in the foreword, Sir Tony says: “Though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy.”
He says “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail”.
He also warns against the “alarmist” tone of the debate on climate change, which he says is “riven with irrationality”.