What is your feeling about what has to be done, that this has to be a massive change of mindset and coordination within government systems at every level?

The starting point has to be honesty.

A British minister the other day said, we need to be more honest with the public about the dangers we face.

And I think that's absolutely right because at the moment there's been a kind of coyness, a kind of unwillingness to scare people, quotes, unnecessarily.

Well, I think we need to be completely open about what we face.

The dangers are much, much greater and more severe right now, never mind the future, than many people recognize.

And I just apply a very simple metric.

that's

Is that the case or are there things that us individuals should be doing?

Oh, I think we can all...

Actually, do you know what? It's interesting.

That's an amazing question.

I never like should, because I don't like being preached at and told what to do.

I think a lot of people don't and react badly to that.

And I certainly find, you know, I kind of bristle when someone says, oh, you shouldn't do that.

And the other thing that the book looks at, which must be a really difficult thing to try and research and predict, whether any of these things could have been prevented, any of the floods, any of the fires and anything that we could be doing in the future in order to prevent them.

So it's interesting to tell just a couple of those stories.

Well, I was just appalled to realize that four years ago when England hit 40 degrees, which was a record and exposed how the country just wasn't ready.

I mean, not only did major rail lines pack up because the steel overheated and buckled, and not only did at least one major hospital lose all its IT system because the air con overheated so that the computer server rooms got too hot.

One of them reached 50 degrees and the computers all packed up.

They had to go to paper.

But also, and this was completely unexpected for most people, a load of wildfires kicked off in the London area.

I mean, who knew that sort of drizzly London would get wildfires? We think of wildfires in California or Canada or Southern Europe.

Is there any other sort of like bad actors that you've seen in this space or more stories about oil and gas and their attempts to change the narrative?

So let's start with you, a bit about your background and what led you to write the book.

Well, I've been a journalist all my life.

My BBC career began in Northern Ireland in the 80s at the height of the Troubles.

And I had a very steep learning curve, learning how to report on riots and explosions and shootings, which were happening almost every day.

Luckily, I was in very good hands with very experienced camera crews who knew what to do.

But the very first riot I went to, we had our car hijacked and a truck exploded.

And it was really quite a baptism of fire literally for me to step into that world.

But I'm kind of curious, who did you write the book for? And how did you decide which stories to include?

I suppose, what do you take away personally, David, from some of those conversations?

That the country, Britain, is not remotely ready for extremes of weather that we're getting now, let alone those to come.

I mean, you mention Lynn Saberton living in Wennington on the, the edge of London.

July the 19th 2022, we hit 40 degrees, and dozens of large wildfires erupted in a great ring around London.

I mean, you think of London burnt by the Great Fire, bombed in the Blitz.

It's never before been encircled by dozens of large wildfires.

Nearly 40 houses were burnt to the ground in the London area because of wildfires that day.

And it, it strikes me that we are on the edges, aren't we, of what we're used to, and therefore perhaps the gaps that you're finding exist because they are genuine gaps at the moment because we've just-- we've not had to test those systems at this level before.

Tell me, what was your approach and how did you come across this approach to writing about the issue in this particular way?

I think people are quite right to groan at yet another climate book.

And actually, I've bought millions and read many of them and often felt a kind of anesthetizing effect.

And so I wanted to start from a completely different perspective rather than the global problem and talk about greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide concentrations and the Paris Agreement and all of that.

Actually start from the bottom up.

What's it like to be a firefighter in 40 degree heat dealing with wildfires erupting even in the suburbs of London, which actually happened four years ago, 40 houses were burnt down.

What it's like to be living in a basement flat, and there are many of them in many of our cities, including London, and suddenly finding that a rainstorm has led to sewage and floodwater just pouring in up to your chin.

Was it difficult for them to open up? And was it difficult for you also, equal measure, to listen to their experiences?

Could you briefly explain a few more of those beyond the fires we've talked about?

A lot of things suddenly went wrong in unexpected ways.

So, for example, at least two major national railway lines had to be shut because when you get an air temperature of 40, the steel in the rails can easily get to 50% more than that, in other words, 60%.

A stretch of railway track in Suffolk was measured at 62 degrees Celsius.

And when you get there, the steel buckles.

And when you get buckling, you can't be sure of running a train down a track without it derailing.

The overhead power lines in that kind of temperature buckle and melt and droop and no longer become serviceable, leading to a really nightmare scenario, which has happened.

So how would you respond to that? And maybe in doing so, it would be nice, could you speak a little bit to this idea of the myth of protection, which you introduce in the book as well? Okay.

I, I guess there's a sort of lesson for us humanity here, isn't there?

It, it, it's stunning listening to that description of how the silver ants cope in the Sahara.

It, it's absolutely the opposite, for example, of what firefighters went through in England, especially in the London area, on Britain's hottest day, which was the 19th of July, 2022, when we hit 40 degrees.

And the city, indeed the country, was taken by surprise by the eruption of a whole load of wildfires.

For the first time in London's history, the city was ringed by enormous wildfires.

They weren't caused by 40 degrees, but 40 degrees, combined with a drought, made them much more likely.

And, and one of the firefighters working that day in the heavy flame-proof suits that they have to wear said it was like being a boil-in-the-bag meal, because the linings of the suits were so sodden with perspiration.

There was even a suggestion that it could've been another great fire of London.

And that was covered.

It was covered, it was focused on, but I hadn't quite realized at the time in the reporting the strain it put on the London Fire Brigade.

They weren't really ready for that kind of d- uh, development.

The public certainly weren't.

There were no public warnings about wildfire risk.

And it turns out if you go through, as I've done, all the logs, all the detail of actually what happened that day-Things could very easily have been much worse.

I commissioned a scientist to look at what would've happened if the wind had been in a slightly different direction in one of the fires in Dagenham.

"Why is the media not seeing these things?"

Mm

... resonated with audience 'cause they could see it, touch it, they use the objects, they're recognizable, unlike this invisible carbon dioxide.

So I think that's-- that there's a lesson in that actually, which I think is bringing things down to the nitty-gritty, to the everyday, and the, and the pragmatic as much as possible.

That also applies, I think, to policymakers.

I mean, to be-To be really as clear as possible and to kind of road test everything that's said in public to try to make sure that it's intelligible to people.

Mm.

And I think if the best thing we can do is to continue whatever can happen to, to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, then anything that as individuals we can do to achieve that is valuable.

So I, I think there is agency in that because, you know, suddenly, unlike ten years ago, the non-fossil fuel alternatives are way more plausible.