Pamela Lane

Storm Shift Pamela Lane

Dr Dan Selby, a socio-meteorologist working for Clifton university, suspects that the climate, peppered by ferocious storms, has flipped to a new phase of instability and extremes. Selby's phrase, 'the Credit Crunch of the eco-systems,' links the collapsing economies of the western world and the worsening weather conditons, as we have been living beyond our means, environmentally, for decades. First the UK has suffered five years of relentless rain - the Deluge - while the US withers under a drought. Then the rain stops. Selby warns that the climate will heat up rapidly now that the Deluge in the UK no longer masks the greenhouse effect which is relentlessly building in the rest of the world. Others disagree, believing that a new sunspot minimum has begun which will cool the climate down and cancel out the effects of global warming. Selby sees that the new currencies in a warmer and more volatile world are food and energy. As Britain's food reserves dwindle, the shortfall can no longer be made up by buying from countries as desperate as ourselves. Politics is becoming side-lined and the fabric of society is starting to fray. An increase in storm activity, Selby believes, will be the last straw which spoils any attempts to maintain food security, leading to a new period of decline and hardship. On the horizon the clouds gather. Are we the generation who threw it all away?