From my Substack diary for Sunday, 28th. June 2026

The heatwave is over! Until next weekend. A whole week of average may sound dull to some, but not to me. I will be getting on with neglected jobs in the home and garden and will even venture out of home and into town!

The main reason for me starting up this diary some ten years ago was to record my life for my future self, or indeed perhaps a future carer, to help them understand the person I was in the event of me losing a few marbles. The period leading up to retirement from a horrendous and soul-destroying job and then of adapting to retirement was one I thought to be of interest. I learned from my university diaries in the 1970’s that the minutiae of life can be interesting: what time did I go to bed; what was the price of a pint of beer; did I really go to all those gigs?

A secondary reason was to record my personal experience of climate change. From the 1990’s on I developed a good understanding of the science as well as the social and economic impacts that would unfold during the rest of my life. When teaching climate change I would usually start by explaining the single key difference between natural climate change and anthropogenic climate change, which is essentially time. Natural climate change occurs, in general, over many thousands or tens of thousands of years – a pace at which life has a chance to adapt. Anthropogenic climate change sits on top of this but occurs at a massively increased rate, reducing that ‘natural’ timescale to less than 200 years, a pace at which much of life cannot adapt. This is highly simplistic of course and I mention it only in relation to my diary.

Two hundred years sounds like a long time, so even superfast human climate change can seem slow to some people, who might perhaps draw the conclusion that nothing much is happening so why should we do anything about it. But in my diary I wanted to record events in my part of the world: heatwaves, crop failures, floods, coastal erosion and so on, These events occur naturally, but not on the scale, severity, and frequency we are seeing now. I am living through it and the thing that frightens me the most – which has always frightened me since these things were modelled in the 1990’s – is not climate change itself but the turmoil and violence that will increasingly occur with disruption to energy, water and food supplies.

We are not there yet but we are inching closer, and every moronic and suicidal call to drill-baby-drill makes it more likely that the predicted dates for such events are brought forward, meaning I may not be able to avoid them in my lifetime.