Climate Change – We Know Zero

The 1% view will kill us all

02. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

A wide angle picture of the Birmingham Catacombs

Some tombs which could do with being visited more often: *The Birmingham Catacombs* – excellent tour available at *Birmingham Walking Tours*

I am currently reading The End of Everything by M John Harrison, which I will be talking about at greater length in a future post. But one aspect I want to pick up now is how the response of the characters to the disappearance of many of the familiar landmarks post apocalypse is to lose their cognitive bearings. Thoughts come and go, often not joined up. They struggle to understand what other people are saying to them.

I think this is a much under-explored aspect of a period of change. Our ability to think about what is going on, to plan, to anticipate is affected. Many of us experienced this during the pandemic. Psychology as a discipline changed significantly as a result of World War 2.

This is also an aspect that speculative narratives like this one often miss. Told from the vantage point of 2100, it has humanity in despair in 2046:

I imagine that today’s world must have seemed like an impossible dream in 2046, when my parents were born in Charleston. Then, an estimated 60 million people had just died in the Great Hunger. The world had warmed by 2 °C, relative to its average temperature in the late 19th century. Ecosystems were collapsing, led by coral reefs.

Instead there is a scenario of an international climate agreement (“The Geneva Climate Compact”), followed by accelerated climate breakdown leading to emergency geoengineering (mostly solar radiation management) which stops global warming by 2080.

International agreements, emergency sessions of the United Nations (even the idea that such a session in 2047 would be the first such session since the pandemic!) and even the European Union is still present and correct in this otherwise devastated landscape. The problem with these sorts of projections is that everything the projector is not looking at (in this case everything except average global temperatures and their direct impacts) is assumed unchanged. Many climate models do the same thing. Indeed a perfectly valid use of climate models is to change one variable and keep everything else the same to try and measure the impact of that variable.

However to really think about the future you need to look to your novelists. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a case in point. In it global sea levels have risen by 50 feet. Everyone lives in tower blocks connected by sky bridges which occasionally topple into the canals which were once streets.

I used to think that money markets would not survive events like this, but Robinson posits what I now believe is a more likely future scenario. The Intertidal Property Pricing Index is developed instead, carefully constructed to be reasonably stable despite the instability of the actual real estate being valued, and people bet on it. And soon everyone is fixated on what this index is saying daily rather than the buildings collapsing around them. This is exactly what our finance sector will do of course. There will be money to be made out of such activities after all. And so expectations that they will, in any way, be a leader out of the climate emergency are, in my view, unrealistic.

But also is the idea that our institutions as currently constructed will lead us out of catastrophe, or that a top down maintenance of international institutions will be a dominant feature of a post-apocalyptic world. Any plans we have for the future must be robust against the possible loss of central authority.

This does not lead us towards survivalist prepping, holing up in some remote area with canned foods, bottled water and armaments. As Alex Steffen teaches in his “ruggedization” classes:

I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed, you have not understood the assignment.

It means the opposite. Remember another thing about the pandemic: people rose to the occasion, just as politicians sunk to it. People checked on the elderly in their neighbourhoods. In Birmingham for instance:

Within weeks of the crisis unfolding, near on 4,000 mutual aid groups registered on the mutual aid website with an estimated 3 million participants stepping forward to support their neighbours and communities. Widely heralded as the ‘early responders’ to the crisis, these groups – alongside thousands more neighbourhood groups – played a fundamental role in ensuring that local residents received immediate support.

This included “food distribution, errands, shopping and picking up prescriptions for those shielding”.

The truth is we all need each other, we all need back up and connecting with your local community is the most effective way that you can “ruggedize” your life. The characters in Harrison’s book have become isolated from each other.

In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp makes the case that the collapse of the “Goliaths” (large imperial powers which dominate the landscape as now) are often linked with improvements in markers of human flourishing like height, life expectancy and equality. This is because, assuming you can avoid the violence associated with the groups scrabbling for status in the ruins of a collapsed state, the main contributors to that flourishing in the past have been local communities rather than at the state level. He worries that, in our current globalised inter-connected world (Ed Conway’s recent article about The 30,000-mile fish finger is one memorable example) this may not necessarily be our experience the next time. As Kemp says:

It is difficult to see through this fog of uncertainty which groups would fare best post-collapse. For now, being poor in wealth but rich in friends is a better strategy than being a suspicious billionaire under siege in a bunker. Not only that, but cultivating bonds of solidarity and mutual aid rather than ruthless self-interest means that the survivors are more likely to help recreate a world that is worth preserving.

If you want a thought experiment about what happens to the billionaires post-collapse, by the way, I recommend Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Cory Doctorow’s novella The Masque of the Red Death (not that one!). Both dark and hilarious in equal measure.

The future is all of ours to make, but we really need to think about it independently and not necessarily along the tracks that the political class funnel all discussions down. That is a 1% world they are discussing. I will leave the last word to Luke Kemp:

Our greatest achievements are not because of the 1 per cent; they are collective endeavours. As George Eliot once wrote, ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ It’s time to drop the 1 per cent view and start paying attention to the unmarked tombs and unknown heroes upon whose shoulders we’ve built our world.

Normals: new and otherwise

25. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, COVID-19, Economics, Health, Media & Politics, Risk

Climate campaigners get very irritated with media talking about the “new normal”, pointing out, quite reasonably, that for it to be the new normal would require a degree of climate stability that we have not got, nor have any prospect of getting while we continue to argue about whether net zero (the policy, remember, which is about moving us to a position where we don’t increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere year after year) is affordable. Poverty and health campaigners got very irritated by the call to “get back to normal” after the pandemic, when it had so clearly demonstrated how our “normal” way of organising society had failed to protect so many of its citizens. As even I could see in March 2020:

My view is that some things that must be different post COVID are already clear. I think as a society we are going to demand more resilience, for example:

Resilience of our health service – this means much higher levels of spending, building deliberate over-capacity into the system in normal times;
Resilience of our food supplies, for example strengthening domestic supply chains;
Resilience of our population, so that we do not have 1.6 million food parcels needing to be given out in a year by the Trussell Trust, in the absence of a pandemic, for instance; and
Resilience of our infrastructure – to everything from floods to banking crises to pandemics to storms and heatwaves.

A picture circulating at the time of a Santiago apartment block with a projection onto it of “No volveremos a la normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema” (we won’t get back to normal because normal was the problem) was actually taken the previous year when the Chilean President had used the word “normality” to justifying lifting the state of emergency, leading to large protests:

Source: https://x.com/inesmorsantos/status/1190192093165211648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1190192093165211648%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fodi.org%2Fen%2Finsights%2Fcovid-19-we-wont-get-back-to-normal-because-normal-was-the-problem%2F “We won’t go back to normal, because ‘the normal’ was the problem.”

But we all have trouble with fast moving situations, or even just moving situations. Remember the media coverage in the early weeks of Covid utterly focused on the number of cases going up each week rather than on the underlying pattern this showed, which had been predicted and could be responded to.

In the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries syllabus, subject CS2 Risk Modelling and Survival Analysis has 20% of its content on dealing with our trouble with moving situations via time series:

It boils down to a number of tricks to turn our moving situation into a non-moving or stationary situation, which we can then analyse.

So not being able to deal with things that aren’t stationary is entirely normal. Indeed the Standard Normal Distribution, originally developed in response to a gambler’s query and another thing that we spend a lot of time transforming other distributions into if we can, has a fixed mean of 0 and a fixed variance (a measure of how far things stray from the mean) of 1:

Outside statistical analysis, we use different techniques to make things appear normal. Denial, ie ignoring the departure from normality, is a big one. When this one is no longer tenable in the face of mounting evidence that we are not in Kansas anymore, we often try and depict where we have got to as normal now. This will have been a good strategy in the past: once a natural disaster has passed, taking stock of what has been lost and what remains and working within these new parameters makes more sense than hankering back to how things were before the disaster struck.

However this strategy comes unstuck when one or both of two things are true:

The disaster, or change-event more generally, is not a one-off but a continuing process.
The way we were living before the disaster made the disaster more likely.

So, on climate change, both 1 and 2 are true. On the pandemic, 2 (if you define the disaster as the number of people who died during it, which I do) is clearly also true. And, although it may not be a continuing process, none other than the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government regards another pandemic as “inevitable”.

We have built systems to look at past disasters and, in particular, try and guard against 2. The Covid Inquiry is working its way through the evidence about the pandemic, and has already produced definitive evidence on how we could do things differently for those who wish to read it, but the reporting of its work is patchy, with sometimes unhelpful fixations on the wrong thing.

And denial tends to fight back as our go-to defence mechanism, which is why we often seem to need to have Public Inquiries about the same things again and again and again.

It is all quite normal. That is the problem.

Professions, triangulation and the costs of adaptation

28. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Economics, Education, Health, Professions

The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https://funandgames.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg *– you may have recently seen the original in The Odyssey*

Last week I mentioned that I thought this blog, for the rest of the year at least, would be about what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of a terrifying future. This week I thought I should start to put a bit of flesh on that particular carcass.

One source for my thinking on this is Alex Steffen. I recently attended one of his Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics webinars. He is particularly good on the importance of continually updating your world view in the face of climate discontinuity and increasing evidence of societal brittleness, and how professions can often be a barrier to doing this:

The greatest danger in any work that asks you to think systemically about the future is getting locked into the worldview that made sense to you when you first began, that you built your successful career on.

We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.

The article then goes on to explain the process of triangulation, by which professionals can “deflate pressure (from the public, regulators or activist stakeholders) to change more quickly and shore up the power of management and experts who would otherwise be forced to admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing”. If someone starts by saying that they support what you are suggesting, then responds with a bunch of short-term easy actions and claims that these are the start of a journey towards what you are suggesting, you are probably being triangulated.

Another is a recent article by Richard Murphy on the political economy of adaptation. As he says:

The biological idea that first made me think this might be possible is called allostasis. It is not a complicated concept. It simply describes the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them.

As we all know, nothing alive exists in a stable environment. Every living thing must continually respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Human beings are no exception. Our brains and bodies are constantly anticipating change and adjusting to it. Most of that work happens without us ever noticing. Allostasis happens all the time, and most of us do not notice. But the fact is that this continual adaptation has a cost.

Murphy points out that, at a time of continual change like ours, that cost is high. And the adaptation required is much higher for people who cannot just throw money at their problems. He then goes on to say:

That changes how we think about political economy. Politics then becomes the process by which societies decide how those costs of adaptation are distributed, whilst economics becomes the study of how institutions either increase or reduce them. Accounting becomes the means by which we identify who ultimately bears the cost of adaptation and health becomes one of the principal ways in which we observe its effects.

I think there is a lot to this approach, which would also provide a structure to identify and critique the triangulation process set out by Steffen. Murphy only mentions education once in this piece:

Education should recognise that human beings learn differently, rather than assuming that everyone should conform to a single model.

I would go a lot further than that, because I think education is the key to helping individuals with their own adaptation strategies as well as in developing the political understanding to see how the costs of adaptation are currently distributed and how to change that within a democratic system. This seems to be an extension of what I have been writing recently about how not to be a reverse-centaur for instance.

The implications for this in health, education and our institutions are considerable in my view and growing all the time. So that is what I am going to be writing about for a while.

Starting next week with allostasis.

55 years

24. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

Two events recently have made me think about the last 55 years in a different way. The first was the last Birmingham Science Fiction Group meeting, which we had dedicated to a 55 year anniversary celebration for the group (the 50th anniversary having been pandemicked). We had a cake, illustrated by David Hardy’s Stratus Hotel, and we showed a film of interviews from members across the years, again featuring some of David Hardy‘s artwork, with stories about guest speakers from Asimov to Frank Herbert to Iain Banks to Jack Cohen and very frank recollections from our current honorary president, Alastair Reynolds. If you want to see the film, you need to join the Group, which you can easily do by emailing us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Seeing some of the original organisers talking about some of these meetings like they had just happened made me reflect on how we often attribute significance to things after the event and tend to downplay things happening around us now. Things are both never as good or important as they used to be and, of course, as we prove to ourselves over and over again, they also are.

The other event was a visit with my brother and his wife to where we used to live, in the officers’ married quarters of an RAF station in Yorkshire, 55 years ago, when I was eight. Just standing on this patch of grass, with a field of wheat still growing the other side of the fence (to the right), I got a very strong sense of another way of getting from there to here. Obviously there was the one I had taken, with countless house moves, school moves, marriages, careers, children, holidays, illnesses and death and grief and so much joy and laughter in the very fortunate and privileged life I have lived.

But what if I had just stood here and the 55 years had just sped past me instead. My Liverpool football kit would have been a bit tight, with the number seven sewn on the back by my Mum (actually that might have been the following year, when the full magnificence of Kevin Keegan had become apparent). Or, much more spookily, if the eight-year-old just found themselves on the same patch of grass 55 years later in a Wells’ The Time Machine kind of way. It all suddenly felt just as possible and plausible, as if the 55 year old football-and-everything-else pitch was still there within touching distance somehow.

The thing is, I could understand the world of 1971, once I had been reminded of a few things no doubt. A world of cash (just decimalised so no shillings and old pence), phones fixed to houses and telephone boxes, smaller cars filled with leaded petrol, three channels on the black and white TV. I had just driven up there in a car with bodywork comprising mostly plastics, with no spare tyre and no wallet. Just a device known as a mobile which can not only make calls, but send and receive text messages, carry out all my financial transactions and navigate me to my brother’s house. My eight-year-old self would recognise very little about this world beyond the patch of grass he stood on and the field beyond the fence where he had parachuted his mother’s childhood teddy bear.

And this is the terrifying thing about life: we are all that eight-year-old facing the incomprehensible future, and so much of what we spend our time doing is trying to deal with that fear and lack of understanding with often meaningless structures and practices and customs to ward off the sense of being totally out of control. Trump is scary because he appears to have taken a lot of the guard rails off the path we are on, with little sense that he understands what he is doing. AI is scary because it is putting its foot on the accelerator before we have a clear idea of where we are going. Climate change is scary because we no longer look like we are headed where we thought we were.

And we try and stick some grit in the wheels to slow down the disruption to our own little bit of the world, whether to our sense of ourselves, or to how we think life should be lived. And sure we need to question whether we need to change things which are working perfectly well, but often the driver for resisting change is fear of what we don’t know is coming and finding familiar things irresistibly reassuring.

And when we realise that it is not just us with our, certainly in my case, fairly small and unimportant lives (although obviously very important to us!), but also the people who seem to be shaping the world around us that feel these insecurities and uncertainties, the possibility of working together to make it easier to adapt to the very weird future that is coming suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish after all.

I think this – what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of this terrifying future – is what I am going to be writing about for the rest of this year, as we all rattle on down the road in the back of someone’s van.

What we can’t know

08. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Book reviews, Climate Change, Education, Media & Politics, Science Fiction

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan is a difficult book to categorise. Some might call it “cli-fi”, as it sets itself in a future significantly altered by human actions and the landscape’s response to those. The Sunday Times appears to think that it might have created a new genre entirely. I think it is best seen as an Oxford novel, even if many of Oxford’s landmarks are submerged for large parts of it. Radiohead even gets a mention. As the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of academics play out on the much-changed landscape of 2119, earnest academics Tom Metcalfe and Rose Church explore the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of 2014 and the quest for the long-lost poem from that year. “A Corona for Vivien” certainly feels like a poem which belongs in a past of barn conversions and dinner parties.

For these academics, The Derangement – which is how they refer to the developing crisis mindset between 2015 and 2030 – is just a backdrop to what they regard as the important drama of their lives. It is followed by the first of several climate wars in 2036 involving nuclear weapons, ironically causing a cooling before the Inundation of 2042 causes the deaths of 200 million, with the UK’s population halving and life needing to be eked out on a cluster of small radioactive islands.

I set this out because the book, while occasionally referring to the eeriness of things, carries on with the work obsessions and love lives of its characters pretty much regardless. If What We Can Know is to be believed, academia carries on much as before, with lectures and seminars and essay marking, despite all of this. For humanities departments currently under the cosh despite the absence so far of a nuclear war, this may seem unlikely.

My grumpiness about all this may be partly due to the fact that I am writing this during a series of record breaking heatwaves and unbudgeable heat domes, but I feel like I have had to make more accommodations to the climate – cancellation of plans, a whole new routine at home with the single aim of keeping the thermometer from moving up any further – than McEwan’s characters seem to be doing in their post-not-quite-apocalyptic lives. Whereas one visit to the swimming pool last month was reduced to bobbing about in water along with a couple of dozen others in a manner reminiscent of the wet bulb event at the start of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, McEwan’s only concession to a future world that can still apparently support an academic entirely focused on a 105 year old poem which has never been seen since, seems to be that journeys anywhere are now more difficult and dangerous.

And yet Tom then travels to Snowdonia (where the Bodleian is now housed) fairly easily. And he and Rose then travel to the flooded valleys of the Cotswolds to attempt to retrieve the poem. The only difficult journey described is once they get on to the target island and have to navigate through thick vegetation without satnav (GPS is no more) or even rudimentary hiking skills between the two of them. At one point we are told the internet is on the way out and at another that there is a National Artificial Intelligence which remembers everything you have ever told it.

This book seems as complicit in the “crisis of realism in fiction” as McEwan, via Rose, accuses everything else written between 2015 and 2030 of being. However it is an entertaining Oxford novel, with tense conversations in parked cars and breathtaking egomaniacs everywhere you look.

What we can’t know is what Tom and Rose will make of it in 100 years’ time.

Reservoirs: this raises the question of what is meant by “safe”

24. June 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, Media & Politics, Regulation, Risk

This week I attended one of the National Emergency Briefing screenings near me. While I wasn’t a fan of the Celebrity Gogglebox presentation style, with Chris Packham on the sofa seeing what Jennifer Saunders and others thought about the climate emergency, it did give me enough of an idea about the individual presentations to want to follow them up, and there is a really good website to do so here.

The two points which struck me particularly were the following:

Professor Tim Lenton warning about what would happen if the weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) hit a tipping point which, in some models, “shows that London would be -20°C in three frozen months of the year, and Edinburgh would be -30°C in five and a half frozen months of the year. And yet the summers will still be hotter than today because it’s a 2°C warmer world.”
Professor Hayley Fowler warning of the risks of mega floods: “These storms can produce two thirds of a year’s rainfall in just a couple of days. Over London, that would mean about 35cm of rainfall falling over a large area. A flood of this scale will be a national crisis. Recovery would take years.” She also warned that by 2050 1 in 4 properties – 8 million in England – will be at risk of flooding.

And since flooding often follows a heatwave such as the one we are currently experiencing, I thought I would look at the risk of long-term flooding in a bit more detail, which is when I came across the government’s check the long term flood risk for an area in England website. When you put in your postcode, it assesses your flood risk under four different categories:

It then explains how they measure the risk and the kinds of things which tend to affect it. All in all a good resource, and the modelling behind it is what the 1 in 4 properties at risk of flooding by 2050 is based on.

In July 2021, several European countries were affected by severe floods. The floods started in the United Kingdom as flash floods causing some property damage. Later floods affected several river basins across Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland. At least 243 people died in the floods, including 196 in Germany, 39 in Belgium, two in Romania, one in Italy and one in Austria. It was thought that some of the affected regions may not have seen rainfall of this magnitude in the last 1,000 years.

A study using climate simulations on a grid of 2.2km squares published in June 2021 had come to the following conclusion:

Intense rainstorms are expected to be more frequent due to global warming, because warmer air can hold more moisture. Here, using very detailed climate simulations (with a 2.2 km grid), we show that the storms producing intense rain across Europe might move slower with climate change, increasing the duration of local exposure to these extremes. Our results suggest such slow-moving storms may be 14× more frequent across land by the end of the century. Currently, almost-stationary intense rainstorms are uncommon in Europe and happen rarely over parts of the Mediterranean Sea, but in future are expected to occur across the continent, including in the north. The main reason seems to be a reduced temperature difference between the poles and tropics, which weakens upper-level winds in the autumn, when these short-duration rainfall extremes most occur. This slower storm movement acts to increase rainfall amounts accumulated locally, enhancing the risk of flash floods across Europe beyond what was previously expected.

As Professor Fowler says:

Our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists. Raised reservoirs, drainage, housing and transport were designed many years ago when extreme rainfall was rare and less severe. As rainfall intensifies, risks such as dam overtopping and cascading failures rise.

The government also produces monthly reports on rainfall, soil moisture deficit, river flows, groundwater levels and reservoir levels. This includes a wonderful map of the year’s rainfall:

What struck me was that the report looked at exactly the same things (river levels, groundwater levels and reservoirs) but, because they were concerned with low levels of rainfall, did not even mention flood risk. The rainfall scale only goes up to >125mm rainfall within a month as a maximum, which looks hilarious when compared with the 271.5mm of rainfall over 48 hours in parts of Belgium in 2021.

There have been no new reservoirs built in the UK since 1992, just another one of the gifts of water privatisation discussed previously. The government announced last year that it had “seized control of the planning process” to build two reservoirs due to be complete in 2036 in the Cambridgeshire Fens and 2040 near Sleaford in Lincolnshire respectively.

Professor Fowler says the probability of dam overtopping is increasing. So how’s the review of reservoir safety going?

In 2019, there was a failure of a dam at Toddbrook Reservoir in the Peak District. The operation to pump water out of the reservoir to safeguard Whaley Bridge seems to have been dominated by concerns about the fish. The independent review commissioned into the incident identified the rather alarming fact that:

“…the reservoir and its Owner can be compliant with the legislation without the reservoir necessarily being safe.”

Among the report’s recommendations were the following:

There is a systematic review of how the current Reservoirs Act, and the associated Regulations and Guidance, are implemented. This should consider the roles and responsibilities of qualified engineers, whether compliance with the Act is sufficient to ensure safety, and how safety is formally assured.
The potential of an Inspecting Engineer issuing a Certificate of Safe to Operate be explored. This should include a review of practice in other safety critical infrastructure sectors. It should also consider liability implications and whether some form of qualifying statement may be needed to accompany the certificate.
The statutory maximum period between inspections is reviewed to determine if it is still appropriate in every case in the light of the ageing reservoir stock.

In his follow up report looking at the reservoir system in general in 2021, Professor David Balmforth made this extraordinary statement:

This raises the question of what is meant by “safe”. In other infrastructure sectors and with reservoirs in other countries, safety is assured by managing risk, and by reducing that risk so far as is reasonably practicable – the terms “reasonable” and “practicable” being well understood in practice and in law. For a reservoir, risk is defined as a combination of the likely failure of the dam (or other reservoir structure) and the impact that an uncontrolled release of water would have on the area downstream, particularly the likely loss of life. I have therefore recommended that in future the assurance of reservoir safety should be managed on the basis of risk, and that the amount of effort (and cost) associated with that process should be in proportion to that risk. In this way the public can be assured that the hazard posed by reservoirs is being managed in an objective and transparent way.

It would appear that reservoir management is playing catch up on the whole concept of risk management.

What has followed is a policy paper from the Environment Agency on the launch of a reservoir safety reform programme. However the public consultation on the proposed reforms has already been delayed until later this year. And the page about the consultation process does not suggest anyone is in any hurry.

The world according to the fig tree

06. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, Economics, Media & Politics

*This fig tree is in the cemetery at Mission Santa Barbara. “Fig Tree” by HarshLight is licensed under CC BY 2.0.*

I am reading a wonderful book at the moment: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. It has allowed me to inhabit the Cyprus of the late 50s and mid 70s and understand a bit more about why my time on the island after my birth in 1962 was so short. It is also the first book I have read where a major character is a fig tree.

And it is the fig tree that makes the most acute observations about humans. My favourite one is this:

Even so, based on personal experience, I can tell you one thing about humans: they will react to the disappearance of a species the way they react to everything else – by putting themselves at the centre of the universe.

Humans care more about the fate of animals they consider cute – pandas, koalas, sea otters and dolphins, too, of which we have many in Cyprus, swimming and frolicking about our shores. There is a romantic idea as to how dolphins perish, washed to the beach with their beak-like snouts and innocent smiles, as if they have come to bid humankind one last farewell. In truth, only a small number do that. When dolphins die, they sink to the bottom of the sea, as heavy as childhood fears; that’s how they depart, away from prying eyes, down into the blue.

Bats are not deemed to be cute. In 1974, when they died in their thousands, I didn’t see many people shedding a tear for them. Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.

Humans find mice and rats nasty, but hamsters and gerbils sweet. Doves signify world peace, whereas pigeons are nothing more than carriers of urban filth. They proclaim piglets charming, wild boars barely tolerable. Nutcrackers they admire, even as they avoid their noisy cousins, the crows. Dogs evoke in them a sense of fuzzy warmth, while wolves conjure up tales of horror. Butterflies they look on with favour, moths not at all. They have a soft spot for ladybirds, and yet if they were to see a soldier beetle, they would crush it on sight. Honeybees are favoured in stark contrast to wasps. Although horseshoe crabs are considered delightful, it’s a different story when it comes to their distant relatives, spiders…I have tried to find a logic in all this, but I have come to the conclusion that there is none.

This compulsion of humans to put themselves at the centre of the universe and dominate everything else is being written about by many writers at the moment, all of them giving it different names. Nate Hagens sees our species as part of an economic Superorganism:

This Superorganism is mindless, unplanning, and energy-hungry. It isn’t evil, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It solely optimizes for throughput, scale, and for more – even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind behind the wheel, only billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.

Samuel Miller McDonald refers to it as “parasitic energy capture”. Pointing out that:

When the limits to their extraction of resources are exceeded, the parasitic systems must either suffer a crash or must invade and take the energy of a more distant ecology or society.

Luke Kemp refers to the consequent empires we have built as Goliaths, with diminishing returns on extraction ending fairly predictably:

The result is more extractive institutions creating growing instability, internal conflict, a drain of resources away from government, state capture by private elites, and worse decision-making. Society – especially the state – becomes more fragile. Private elites tend to take a larger share of extractive benefits. The state, and many of the power structures it helps prop up, then usually falls apart once a shock hits: for Rome it was climate change, disease, and rebelling Germanic mercenaries; for China it was often floods, droughts, disease and horseback raiders; for the west African kingdoms it was invaders and a loss of trade; for the Maya it was drought and a loss of trade; and for the Bronze Age it was drought, a disruption of trade and an earthquake storm.

And so it should come as no surprise that the latest Planetary Solvency report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and Anglia Ruskin University – Planetary Solvency: Tipping into the wild unknown – catalogues a terrible toll on the Earth system which supports us, with biodiversity loss, climate shocks and geopolitical conflict disrupting the food system, risking catastrophic impacts for the financial system and for society as a whole.

A few examples from the report:

The world lost 26.8 million hectares of natural forest in 2024 alone. This is larger than the entire UK, which spans 24.9 million hectares. This activity generated 10 gigatons of carbon emissions;
In the UK alone, bees and other pollinating insects have on average lost a quarter of their habitat since 1980. Around 75% of the different crops used in global food production relies on pollinators to some extent, although by weight the dependence is around 35%. Loss of pollinators would reduce yields for most crops but would wipe out some altogether, eg brazil nuts, kiwi, melon and cocoa.
Around the UK, warming seas have already begun shifting fish populations northward, with cod, haddock, and salmon being replaced by species like anchovy, bluefin tuna and squid (the real story behind the catfish sold in fish and chip shops headlines)…If global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and pollution continue on their current trajectories, the economic and social consequences are likely to be severe. In the event of more extreme tipping points, such as the collapse of the Gulf Stream, the consequences could be even more catastrophic.
Around 70% of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, with land-use change, deforestation and wildlife trade increasing the risk of future pandemics.

So what can be done? The planetary solvency report defers to the UK Government’s Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security – a national security assessment at this point, which makes the following points:

The UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock: a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required. It would also require greater investment in the agri-food sector so that it is capable of innovating in sustainable food production.
Some technologies exist that could help, but need significant research, development and investment to have a chance of working at scale. Protecting and restoring ecosystems is easier, cheaper and more reliable. The time required to develop and scale technologies is unknown without further research. Both existing (plant pre-breeding, regenerative agriculture) and emerging technologies (AI, lab grown protein, insect protein) offer potential solutions.

The other writers mentioned above all look at the future slightly differently:

Hagens is pessimistic about our chances of stopping the Superorganism, but believes we can start planning now for what comes next. Miller McDonald hopes for the “opening up of possibility for alternative forms of organisation of human life”. Luke Kemp says that collapse has historically benefited the 99% at the expense of the elite 1%, although he does worry that our modern economy makes us more dependent upon global infrastructure and we have much scarier weapons than in the past.

But shocks in the short and medium term – of the climate, of the economy and of our politics – now have a feeling of inevitability about them. I wonder how the fig tree will feel about them.

The Slow, The Shine and The Darkness

12. April 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Book reviews, Climate Change, COVID-19, Economics, Media & Politics, Science Fiction

This review originally appeared in the April issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (with light editing) by kind permission

A few years ago the historian Adam Tooze said the following about the times we are living in:

If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.

The word he came up with for this experience was “polycrisis”. It described the interplay of the Covid pandemic, Ukraine war and the energy, cost-of-living and climate crises. To that we could now add Trump 2nd term, war in Gaza and now the Gulf.

I am reviewing this book while I have Covid, which has certainly facilitated the kind of inner focus which I think the book is asking for. Because Slow Gods is polycrisis in the form of space opera, but a curiously interior-monologuey kind of space opera, more psychological than boom-boom.

The premise, as Claire North set out for us at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group last June, is that a binary star system is due to collapse which will obliterate all life within an 83 light-year blast radius. Unusually, the populations in the vicinity are warned of this precisely 100 years in advance by a perfect black sphere moving through space at sub-light-speed and known by everyone as the Slow.

The Slow listens to everything, remembers it and will consider it.

We follow the story through the eyes of Maw, who has been killed and has recovered in such a way as to be very difficult to kill after that. Making Maw an ideal candidate for Pilot, the organic sentient needed in the pilot’s seat of any ship wishing to enter arcspace which lets it travel across the universe faster than light, at huge personal cost. Pilots die frequently and each planetary system has its own way of choosing and rewarding its Pilots. Only Maw appears to be able to act as Pilot again and again, which makes the people around Maw nervous.

The main thing about Maw which makes people nervous is Maw’s relationship with “the darkness” which reaches into any ship in arcspace, in many cases sending people mad. Maw, instead, becomes “curious”, exploiting a changing relationship and perception of matter in the darkness to do monstrous things. But, despite all this, Maw is still required to keep running missions, although usually with a mechanical assistant to keep Maw from getting “dysregulated”.

This unusual set up turns out to be a way of observing the psychology of the polycrisis with some clarity. The United Social Venture is an empire where its subjects acquired debt just from being born (measured in Glint):

Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

This economic system was referred to as Shine. The Shine were one of the few systems which used prisoners for Pilot work.

One of the joys of the book is the exploration of difference, lots of details about avoiding giving offence when the Xi of Xihanna ask Maw to pilot a ship to Adjumir to bring out historical artefacts and Maw meets Gebre of the Haalo Institute. Maw finds that Normspeak is regarded as a very crude way of communicating and starts, haltingly, to learn Adjumiri (which is at least in part a click language). So begins a very moving love story.

Gender differences between systems are very striking. The Shine have only two genders – “he” and “she” – although the elite also have hé and shé. The most manly and the most feminine.

There are four genders in Xihanna, but they are not regarded as particularly important characteristics of a person and dispensed with once you know someone well. On Adjumir, there are eight, with very few Adjumiris remaining the same gender all their lives. These differences are picked out by the brilliant use of pronouns, a useful technique in a book full of characters. Even mechanicals, who have no particular interest in gender, are referred to as qe/qis as a mark of respect as “they do not wish to be put in the same category as a bowl of soup or a broken chair”.

We join Maw towards the end of the 100 year programme to evacuate the populations of Adjumir and Hadda to relative safety, with 800 million still on the planets and increasingly desperate. The Slow has effectively taken on a role as God through its massive databases, calculation capacity and sheer longevity. It seeks out Maw as it has plans for him. The Slow has been around so long that qe sees everything in the very long run. Which means that the emotional turmoil and intense highs and lows of individual lives are all averaged out to nothing. Qe calculates in terms of galaxy-level populations on the basis of what qe has come to think of as love.

What calculation would the Slow make about our world, with all our nation states and their often tiny differences blown up to justify war aims? Donald Trump certainly has to have the most Shine of any US President for some time.

Slow Gods moves slowly but relentlessly towards a showdown between Maw and Theodosius Rhode, the Executor of the Shine and executioner of his mother. There is much tragedy along the way and the ending is not straightforward but ultimately very satisfying. It’s an uplifting ride.

Talking Terraforming in Birmingham

08. April 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, Climate Change, Media & Politics, Risk, Science Fiction

*Front page of the April 2026 issue of Brum Group News*

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a piece likening the rapid climate change on Earth to the fairly well-established science fiction concept of terraforming, but in reverse. So what has happened since? Well last summer, according to researchers at Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, two thirds of the 24,400 heat deaths from June to August across Europe were due to human-made global heating. And a study published last month has suggested that the pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015.

It this point I would like to suggest rehabilitating an old word to describe this process, in the opposite direction to terraforming (which is action designed to make a planet more habitable). Barrenize means to make barren or sterile and was used between the mid 1600s and the early 1700s according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originally in the context of animal husbandry. I think it’s time to bring this word back.

In a week when a US President has threatened, variously, “blowing everything up and taking over the oil” and that Iranians would be “living in Hell”, to last night saying that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, unless they opened the Strait of Hormuz, it certainly sounds like a commitment to barrenization to me, only at a faster pace than the global warming he is already doing everything possible to accelerate further.

On Friday this week, the Birmingham Science Fiction Group will have Oliver Bettis as its guest speaker. Oliver has been a leading actuary in the field of sustainability for many years. He is one of the authors of a series of publications by the actuarial profession in collaboration with the University of Exeter in recent years.

Climate Scorpion shows how we need to develop a best guess about the worst-case scenarios and make policy on that basis, given our lack of knowledge about extreme climate risk and tipping points.

Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature sets out an approach to civilisational risk management which attempts to address the fact that the severity and frequency of extreme events are unprecedented and beyond current model projections.

Parasol Lost, which we will be discussing in particular this Friday, focuses on the cooling effect of aerosols: a side-effect of pollution from fossil fuel burning. Without aerosol cooling the global temperature would be around 0.5°C higher than the 1.4°C increase above pre-industrial temperature that we have today. It is critically important to recognise that, as air pollution is cleaned up, this may ironically lead to a short-term increase in warming through the loss of aerosol cooling. The question must be asked, can we afford to lose this cooling and if not, should this be replaced by working with nature, using technology or both?

This will allow us to tap into the rich history of science fiction literature on terraforming (and dealing with the threat of barrenization) and whether this can allow us to look at this question in a new way. It should be a lively discussion.

This event will be held in-person at the Friends of the Earth Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street,
Birmingham B5 5TH and simultaneously on Zoom, with online access opening from around 7.45 for an 8 pm start.

Ticket prices for non-members are £8 for in-person attendance and £6 for Zoom attendance. For members it’s £4 in-person attendance and free Zoom attendance.

Tickets can be purchased on the door or via the Eventbrite link below:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1985958692911

And if this whets your appetite for more science fiction and you think you might like to join the group, just email us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Hope to see you there!

Fine wines, disappointing brandy and petrol prices

13. February 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Climate Change, Economics

*The disappointing brandy scene from Goldfinger (1964) https://youtu.be/I6COBucJQfE?si=saiV5f80ISSB3FGY*

Politics is a bit depressing this week, so I thought instead I would focus on the asymmetry of our attitudes towards different high octane liquids.

I remember when I first got interested in wine. It was the early noughties and I was out at a restaurant in Cardiff called Le Cassoulet (no longer trading under that name I understand) with my then boss who liked to hit his expense account pretty hard from time to time. The sommelier seemed to know him quite well and scurried off to get him some particularly old claret to accompany the meal. I think it was from 1972 or thereabouts. I remember noting that it had a different colour (brown) from the red wine I was used to drinking and, when sipped, there were a lot of different flavours and smells competing for my attention. Something which I later heard described as “complexity”. From then on I realised that wine drinking could involve something a bit more than just something nice in a glass to accompany a meal.

The journey of alcoholic drinks from drinks to luxury consumer items and assets is nicely illustrated by the Bond franchise. There are a number of movies we could choose but let’s go for Goldfinger, shall we?

In the disappointing brandy scene from Goldfinger, we have this exchange between M, Bond and the Governor of the Bank of England, Colonel Smithers:

Smithers: “Have a little more of this rather disappointing brandy.”

M: “What’s the matter with it?”

Bond: “I’d say it was a 30-year-old Fine indifferently blended, sir…with an overdose of Bons Bois.”

M: “Colonel Smithers is giving the lecture, 007.”

Now first of all, that is clearly not what the Governor of the Bank of England looks like. As readers of this blog already know, he looks like this:

That scene is also notable for including a brief discussion of how the relative value of gold held at the US and British central banks at the time was used “to establish respectively the true value of the dollar and the pound”. In 1964 this would have been via the London Gold Pool, running between 1961 and 1968, by which a group of eight central banks including the United States Fed and the Bank of England agreed to cooperate in maintaining the Bretton Woods System of fixed-rate convertible currencies and defending the gold price. Ian Fleming’s book, written in 1959, predated this arrangement, but the anxieties about the gold market which led to its creation would have been very much around. So we still have the Governor (meeting Bond alone rather than with M) saying (during a lecture which went on for 10 pages):

We can only tell what the true strength of the pound is, and other countries can only tell it, by knowing the amount of valuta we have behind our currency.

Valuta is a rare word, from American English, for the value of one currency in terms of its exchange rate with another, and perhaps an odd one for the Governor of the Bank of England to use. But it is clear that Bond is sent after Goldfinger primarily for economic reasons (finding a way to smuggle large amounts of gold across borders threatens the Bank of England’s cosy little gold club) rather than because (spoiler alert) Goldfinger thinks nothing of murdering people (quite a lot of people in the case of Operation Grand Slam) who get in his way, cheating at golf, employing butlers with lethal bowlers, slicing through things with gold lasers and planting nuclear devices in Fort Knox. Released shortly after Ian Fleming’s death, it was the last Bond movie he saw in production.

It is the same film in which Bond obsesses about getting his favourite champagne (Dom Perignon 1953 – Bond was also someone not afraid to hit his expense account pretty hard from time to time) chilled to 38°F (3.3°C) before he gets bashed on the back of the head and the girl he is with (Goldfinger’s assistant, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton) gets sprayed from head to toe with gold paint. Perhaps more than any other brand, Bond linked luxury and high octane liquids of various kinds.

Skip forward a few decades and some of it has clearly stopped being something to drink at all, but instead a, very fragile, status asset for the very rich to demonstrate their status to each other. Here are the top prices achieved by wine at auction from one website, 8 of the 10 of them pre-dating both me and Goldfinger:

Source: vinovest https://www.vinovest.co/blog/25-most-expensive-wines-in-the-world-2026

Contrast this with the way we have treated fossil fuels. As Luke Kemp points out in Goliath’s Curse:

We tend to forget that fossil fuels come primarily from long-dead plants and animals. These organisms died between 360 and 286 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, after capturing sunlight through photosynthesis or other means. It is that fossilised energy that we are consuming. According to one estimate, it would take 400 years of global photosynthesis to power the modern world for one year. It takes ninety-eight tons of organic matter buried during the Carboniferous to become just five litres of petrol. We are now a high-energy Goliath, powered by dead matter.

According to a petrol price checker from earlier this week, the garage closest to me currently sells unleaded petrol for £1.29 a litre. So 98 tones of organic matter curated for 300 million years retails for £6.45. That’s less than half the price of a sausage bap and a coffee from Costa via UberEats:

But apparently it’s still not cheap enough.

Most of the content from this article recommending eternal vigilance despite the cheapest prices for 5 years and the claims that “petrol is still 6p too high at the pumps” comes from Howard Cox, founder of FairFuelUK. Whose website includes this picture with a not-too-presumptious-claim-at-all below it:

Even if you weren’t concerned with climate change or the health effects of petrol fumes in the air, this seems like a strange hill for anyone to be dying on. And dying we are. According to the 2025 Global Report of the Lancet Countdown average global heat-related mortality has now reached 546,000 pa, up 63% in just over 20 years:

And that’s just heat. A recent report from the Royal College of Physicians: A Breath of Fresh Air estimated 30,000 deaths from air pollution each year, of which car emissions form an important component.

By the time even the Bond franchise had started worrying about environmental concerns in 2008 with Quantum of Solace, a Somerset Maughamish short story converted into an attempt by a sinister organisation to become the water monopoly in Bolivia through underhand means, the iconic shot of the woman covered in gold had become a female consular employee (Strawberry Fields, played by Gemma Arterton) drowned in oil:

*Source; http://007magazine.co.uk/factfiles/factfiles_trivia5.htm*

We currently pay between £3.12 and £7.09 per litre in duty on wine, depending on strength, and £0.53 per litre in duty on petrol.

Our attitude to different types of high octane liquids has clearly been nuts in all kinds of ways for a long time. But it is just part of our political frostbite at the moment: we allow our living organisations and institutions to remain frozen in time because we have always done things that way, regardless of the living tissue we are killing in the process. From the endless cycle of public inquiries and ignored recommendations to our use of economics to rationalise things we have already decided to do to batting on with traditional exams: it seems we are just going to do what we are going to do. And freezing fuel duty now looks like it needs to be added to that list.

We can laugh at Trump for accepting an award of “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” by the Washington Coal Club and legislating that black is now white by revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific ruling from 2009 about the harms of climate change. But Trump does at least think he needs a reason to support the fossil fuel industry, even if he needs to make one up. We are just doing it because our politics has gangrene.

We Know Zero