Written by Daniel Hatton
Yet again I need to write about the heat, because as we head into the fiery depths of the fifth heatwave of the year, we’re all more than a little bit sick of it. It’s like someone coming up to you and occasionally punching you in the face as you’re trying to get on with your day. You have to put everything on hold and sit around with ice on you to try and feel better. And just as you’ve recovered from last time, they do it again. Even though we’ve all more or less acclimatised to the warm weather, this latest round of burning heat is still just as uncomfortable. Sitting here writing this, I can feel the heat of the sun radiating off of the blind in the window next to my desk, and it's like sitting by a radiator that's been on for a few hours. There are some things that are making it slightly more tolerable, like the humidity only being 30 percent, and because we’re now heading towards the middle of August, by 9pm the sun has more or less disappeared, meaning it's cooling down slightly in the evenings.
The plants are suffering as well. They’re getting days of scorching heat with no rain, and then as they slowly try and recover whilst still not being rained on, the heat comes back to give them another good toasting. At this rate we’re going to be able to pick freshly roasted vegetables straight from the plant. More worryingly still, the leaves are already falling from the trees two months early. It’s not just plants either. The fields are starting to look like deserts, and the roads have started melting. I’m dreading the road closures come autumn when they have to resurface all the roads.
The most worrying part of it all is the fact that a lot of the UK is now in a drought. Some reservoirs are getting dangerously low, and we’re all banned from using our hosepipes, meaning I have to use a watering can to water the pumpkin I’m growing for Halloween, which would be fine if the watering can didn’t have a small hole in the bottom, dear Liza.
It seems they're building new houses at a rate of knots, but we're not building reservoirs at anything like the same rate to supply these newly built towns, so they’re tapping off of water supplies that already start to struggle the minute the skies dry up, which, given the last two years, seems to be becoming a regular thing. There is talk of building more, but I’m not sure when they’ll be built.
If this really is the new normal, then surely, we need to start changing the way we do things. Rather than sitting around moaning about how much better it used to be when it rained, we need to get better at storing water whilst we can, ready for when the rain goes on vacation for the summer. I'm serious, but why aren’t we collecting more rainwater? We get plenty of it for most of the year, so why not catch it in tanks and underground reservoirs and keep it for when we really need it?
And what about all the water we use that isn't really dirty? Every day there are hundreds of people washing their hands, brushing their teeth and having showers. All that water disappears down the drains, gets treated somewhere and eventually ends up in the sea while we're desperately trying to keep the grass alive outside. Surely some of that water could be loosely filtered and reused for watering the grounds or flushing the bogs in shopping centres. We’ll just have to put up a sign that says Do not drink. To be fair, if you do drink from the loo in the first place, you have bigger issues. At the moment the grass is so dry it looks like the floor of a barn, yet we've got perfectly usable water disappearing down a pipe every time somebody washes their hands. Just stick it on the grass. It won’t mind.
We could do the same with rainwater, too. Collect it from the roofs of buildings, store it in tanks and use it for things that don't require drinking water. Farms would massively benefit from it if we could find a way of storing the water from the sky to feed the food of tomorrow. I know we could never soak the fields like when the heavens open, but what if there was some way of being able to precision water each plant with just enough moisture to keep it growing?
The UK is an island. If I remember rightly, you are never more than something like 70 miles from the sea, and chances are there’s a river near you that feeds directly into the big blue. I appreciate that you can't just scoop up a bucket of seawater and pour it into a reservoir, because that would make the reservoir considerably less useful for drinking. But we do have this rather enormous supply of water surrounding us, and desalination technology exists. So why aren't we using more of it to take some of the pressure off our freshwater supplies?
I mean I’m not suggesting we build a giant pipe from the English Channel to Birmingham and start pumping the ocean inland. I'm sure there are several very good reasons why it would be enormously complicated and expensive, but if we're expecting water shortages to become a bigger problem, surely it's worth looking at every option.
My other issue with the heat is the lack of trees. I was at work on Monday slowly roasting, but as soon as I was under the trees, it was just cool enough to be tolerable. What's more is I noticed how the grass in the open was brown and totally cooked, whilst under the trees there were still signs of colour and life. It’s the same whilst out and about as well. Leave your car in direct sunshine, and after a few hours it'll be like getting into a furnace, roasting your rear end on the seat and being forced to hold onto a steering wheel that's so hot it feels like it's just come out of a forge. But park in the shade, and it will still be warm, but nowhere near as bad.
Trees are brilliant at protecting from the heat and the sun, so why don’t we have more trees everywhere? If I had my way, every single street would be lined on both sides with trees, car parks would be full of them and even city centres would be filled with bushes and trees, providing shelter and freshening the air. It would help to solve the heat island issue as well, because the roads would be shaded, meaning they wouldn’t heat up as much and in turn not radiate as much heat, which would help to reduce the air temperature. I guess we’d just need to hire more gardeners.
On the flip side, if this regular prolonged heat is the new normal, I think it's worth considering fitting air con into our homes, because I am tired of waking up in a pool of my own sweat. Either way, if this is the new normal, we really need to reconsider how we go forward, because things are changing, so it's about time we did too.