Dan Snow's History Hit - Climate Catastrophe in the 17th century

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were both unprecedented and widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns, longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers - disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died.Geoffrey Parker, distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History join Dan on the podcast to discuss the sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched across the 1600s. They discuss the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago, and the contemporary implications: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?Geoffrey is the author of ‘Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century'.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a treat it is to be launching ourselves into another year. 2022, we're coming at you hard everybody. History Hit is going crazy this year. We're going to be digging up medieval kings. We're going to be finding shipwrecks. We're going to be scouring the battlefields of France for elusive artefacts that have been sought after by generations of archaeologists. It's all happening this year, folks. But I think it's time to get us started right at the beginning of the year. I'm bringing you a complete legend now, Geoffrey Parker. Geoffrey Parker is an incredibly distinguished professor of European history at Ohio State University. Over a long career, he's written many books, many of which were some of the books that really got me into history in the 80s and 90s. I'm hugely grateful for his work on the kind of

military revolution of the 17th century in Europe. His book about the Spanish Armada was a classic. I mean, this is a big moment for me. I'm meeting one of my heroes. They always say, don't meet your heroes. I've always thought that is garbage. Because in 2013, he wrote a magisterial book. It's probably one of the best history books I have ever read. It should be on all of your shelves. It's called Global Crisis, War, Climate and Catastrophe in the 17th Century. And in that book, he marries two intellectual strands. One is this sense that historians have had that the 17th century was a terrible time to be alive, folks.

A gigantic wave of wars and revolutions and conflict stretching right across Eurasia and beyond, but particularly Eurasia where we have most of the archival sources, from Ireland to Japan, a cataclysm resulting in the deaths of millions of human beings. But also climate scientists who now think that period was also one of global cooling. Geoffrey Parker married the two together, as he'll explain in this podcast, and points out, we're all just running around with our ideas and our religions and our politics on the back of the global climate. If it goes south, we're all going with it. That, folks, is an important message for the following year, and for every year that we've got left. So in this episode,

I just do a deep dive. I geek out. I love the book. Had a big impact on me when I read it 10 years ago. And it's just great to get to grips with Geoffrey and his ideas about that global cooling event, the horrific impact on humans and human societies at the time, and what it all means today, where we're going today with our own climate crisis. If you love 17th century history, if you love all history really, please go to History Hit TV. It's our history channel. It's like Netflix for history. We've got hundreds of hours of documentaries on there, more going on all the time. You've got all the episodes of this podcast and other podcasts without any ads on them. It's all there, folks.

It's all there. History Hit TV. You're going to love it. It's the final day of our crazy Boxing Day sale. Lots and lots of people jumping on the bandwagon. I don't blame them. It's pretty cheap. If you use the code BOXINGDAY, you get 50% off the first six months. If you use the annual code BDAnual, you get 25% off the first year.

Look, there's some major bargains to be had. Follow the link in the description below this podcast. Go and check it out. In the meantime, folks, here is Geoffrey Parker talking about the catastrophe of the 17th century. Geoffrey, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. This is a huge honour. I was an early Geoffrey, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. This is a huge honour. I was an early Geoffrey Parker fan because I remember your work

when you wrote, I guess, primarily military history, magisterial Spanish Armada, things like that. Have you been on a journey? Is that a fair characterisation from primarily military and strategic to this new and vitally important kind of history? 35 years, as they used to say on Round the Horn. 35 years! I remember in 1976, I listened to an interview on the BBC third programme.

I think it's now called Radio 4. And it featured a guy called Jack Eddy, who was a solar physicist. And he just published a paper in Science on what he called the Maunder Minimum, a period between 1645 and 1715 when there are virtually no sunspots. And he speculated that this sunspot minimum, noted by contemporary astronomers, had contributed towards global cooling. He also made a terrible joke in that he noticed that the 1645 to 1715 was exactly the period of Louis XIV's reign, the Sun King. So he made a terrible joke. They were bad in 1976. I suppose they're still terrible now. But he made a very important point, and that is that what he presented was not absence of evidence

but evidence of absence because thanks to the telescope there are a number of astronomers looking at the sun every day there are 8 000 observations between 1645 and 1715 and they're looking for sunspots and they record the fact that they're not there. Precisely 100 sunspots in that 70-year period. Well, we get more than that in a single year now. So this absence of sunspots, said Eddy, almost certainly contributed to what Earth scientists were already calling the Little Ice Age. And I thought, wow, because that connects to something that historians had noticed and called the general crisis, a plethora of rebellions, crises, and disruption around the world at exactly the same time. So I began to think maybe the two are

linked. And I was hooked. That's so fascinating. So many military historians can get distracted by all the trees and perhaps not see the wood. And you're writing about the transition of military technology, the fiscal military state, all that kind of stuff. But there's a sense that you went beyond and tried to dig, just go that bit deeper into literally the climate that underpinned these military changes and political changes, of course, as well. Yeah, so you must remember, Dan, I'm very old. I watched your broadcast on D-Day on the 6th of June, the one with the piper and the little girl in pink. I was six months old on D-Day. So, you know, I've been around a while. I've had a lot of time to dig into the sources. And this was something, this broadcast in 1976, awakened an interest,

but I didn't pursue it single-mindedly for quite a long time. I just accumulated material. Climate has a way of attracting our attention. I'm speaking to you now from Columbus, Ohio. And just two days ago, a series of terrible tornadoes ripped through the state to the south of us, the state of Kentucky, they're still digging out bodies that were killed by this disaster, this extreme weather event. And there are more and more of them. And they are focusing our attention on the fact that the climate is changing. And it seems to me, and it seemed to me when I got serious about writing a book about global crisis. It seemed to me that life is a little like a tape recorder with just three functions. You can press play, and that is you just lie back and see what the music is going to bring, see what the podcast is going to say. Or you can fast forward. That's

the second function. You try to predict trends on the basis of what's happening now. And that's what most climate scientists do. Or you can press rewind and see what happened last time. Studying climate change without looking at the past, without looking at climate history, seems to me a bit like driving without a rearview mirror. I have an analogy for you. a bit like driving without a rearview mirror. I have an analogy for you. Am I allowed an analogy? It's the analogy of Ebola, which was an extremely serious threat. And you have in Britain, my native land, a SAGE committee, SAGE committee for assessing threats like Ebola. And they were completely floored by how it was spreading and then someone on the SAGE committee had the bright idea of consulting anthropologists

and historians of West Africa which was the epicenter of Ebola and those experts said well it's the funeral rites those are the super spreader events so you see historians and even anthropologists if if you ask them, have something to say. But I don't think there was a single historian at COP26. And I do wonder why. You're among friends here, more historians everywhere, in every room in which decisions are being made. Let's deal the headline, because that blew my head off when I opened your enormous book. We think that in the 17th century, the global temperature fell by how much? About two degrees Celsius. So almost exactly the same as the rise

in global temperatures that we're facing now. Now, that may not seem a lot, but the difference between the warmest period on record, which is what we call the Middle Ages, and the end of the last glaciation is six degrees. So a two degree switch one way or the other is very, very significant to life on this planet. It's obviously very, very difficult to get an accurate figure, but you estimate what proportion of the human population died as a result of that cooling? It's a guess, but where we have data, it seems like one third of the population overall perishes in the mid 17th century. If you compare the level at say 1620 and say 1700, it seems to have diminished by about one third. We have pretty good records for many European countries. We've got really very good

records for China and Japan. And all of them show a catastrophic fall in the population around the 17th century. The question is whether it's induced by climate change. And there are really two, I call them two archives, two ways of looking at it. One is what we might call the natural archive. That's to say climatic data like ice cores, the advance and retreat of glaciers, deposits of pollen, which tells you what sort of vegetation was around and above all, the size of tree rings. Tree rings every year, every tree on this planet puts down a ring, a growth ring. And when it's a small growth ring, you know it was a bad year for growth of crops. When it's a large, fat tree ring, you know it was a good year for crops. That's the natural archive. There's also the human archive, which is chronicles,

diaries, numerical information like the date on which harvests are brought in. In many villages, the harvest, whether it's grain or grape, the harvest is coordinated. You agree, yes, the harvest is ready, and you all go out and start harvesting your crops. And that is recorded, and we can see that in some years in the 17th century, it's a month later than it had been in the 16th century. That indicates not only later than it had been in the 16th century. That indicates not only a later harvest, but also a small harvest. Is it Northern Ireland you go to when you actually see if you can marry the two archival sources together?

Goodness me, you have been reading, haven't you? Yes, Northern Ireland happens to be a… You see, the problem is this. You mustn't draw bullseyes round bullet holes. You can't say, ah, here's a crisis. Well, let's see what climatic conditions were there. Could we perhaps say that an earthquake or a volcano caused it? In Northern Ireland, in the records of particularly the province of Ulster, you have an extraordinary record which puts together these two sources. In October 1641, following three years of bad harvests, there is an uprising of the tenants who are largely Catholic against landlords who are largely Protestants. And a number of the Protestant landlords are murdered outright, but most of them are then turned out of their homes, chased out of their homes,

and they die. Why do they die? Well, we know the answer because shortly after the Ulster Uprising, there is a series of depositions taken down of the survivors. We have 2,000 men and about 600 women who record what happened to them, what they heard, what they saw. And it's all written down. It's about 20,000 pages. It is bound into books, which are deposited in Trinity College, Dublin. And they've been there, you know, they've been hiding in plain sight for about 200 years. But in 2010, thanks to the grant of about a million euros from the European Union, remember the European Union, money was provided to transcribe and to digitize the entire 20,000 pages. So you can now go to 1641.tcd.ie and type in, for example, snow and frost, and you will find about 65 entries just for those two words.

Now, one of them is a witness called frost, and the other is a victim called snow. But most of the entries are, in fact, about cold and the way in which cold weather, exceptionally cold weather, causes the death of those who'd been turned out. In fact, if you calculate all the words together and you take all the data, which you can, thanks to this million euro grant, you will find that twice as many people die in October 1641 of the extreme cold as are killed by their Catholic neighbours. Now we're talking about ireland we're talking about october it's very unusual to get frost and snow in that period in ireland so this is really people who are killed by the global cooling now you may say oh how do you know that well we also have the

records unfortunately ireland is pretty thin on rings. But we do have data from tree collections and other natural archive sources from other areas. And we can see that 1641 was, in fact, perhaps I think it's the third coldest winter on record in the last 600 years. So the Protestants of Ireland were doubly unlucky. Number one, there was a rising provoked by the bad harvest. And number two, it happened at a time of exceptional climatic adversity. So climate intensified a political problem. The two go together, you cannot separate them out. Well, this is what's, of course, the central point about your work, so fascinating. Let's leave aside North and South Americaica for a second where there was an overlapping cataclysmic pandemic related dying

off of humans going on but you present interesting evidence in amerindian sources around death because of climate related stuff as well but let's go from northern ireland all the way across japan you've mentioned 1641 the war of the three. We used to call it Civil War here in England, the UK. We now think the bloodiest per capita war in modern history of the Isles. But this is going on. We've got the Thirty Years' War in Europe. We've got cataclysms going on in Persia, Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. Just quickly rehearse just some of these unbelievable conflicts and upheavals that we get. Well, in the case of China, China and Japan are separate stories. They both suffer from the same global clueling as everywhere else. They react in very different ways. In the case of China, you have the Ming dynasty, which has been in power for nearly

three centuries, is losing its grip, and it's losing its grip because of a series of harvest failures and popular revolts. And in the end, one of the popular leaders starts off in Western provinces and marches all the way to Beijing. He was a nobody. It's like he was a peasant, right? Extraordinary story. Yeah, it is an extraordinary story. And he clearly is a charismatic figure. Li is a very charismatic figure. But he is a charismatic figure because he manages to unify all sorts of discontented people, discontented with the Ming, but above all, they're starving. They're starving and they go to the big city because they think that's where they're going to get fed, and no one

will fight for the Ming emperor. He, in the end, the last Ming emperor, goes away to the garden of his palace and hangs himself to avoid the humiliation of being captured by the rebels. There is, however, another problem brewing in China, which is north of the Great Wall, you have the Manchu. And they also are suffering from harvest failures, and they are massing their troops along the Great Wall, ready to come in, ready to invade China, to try and find food resources, because they too are starving. And the commander of the Ming forces on the Great Wall thinks he can do a deal. And he says, look, Manchus, if I let you in, will you help me get rid of this peasant who has taken over the capital? And the Manchu, of course, said, sure, of course we will, we'll help you out. And they do. And they

take over Beijing themselves. And then they do a very foolish thing. There's a saying in Glasgow, crossing the street to pick a fight. And the Manchu, who now call themselves the Qing dynasty, decide that they want a demonstration of instant loyalty from their new Chinese subjects. They've taken over North China in about three weeks. It's an extraordinary success story. But now they say, right, if you are loyal to our new dynasty, you will dress like us and above all, you will shave your heads like us. You will shave the front of your heads if you're a man, and you will have a pigtail at the back. That's what men do if they're loyal to our dynasty. This does not go down well with the Chinese, and they start rebelling. They start refusing,

leading to the interesting statement, keep your hair and lose your head. Lose your hair and keep your head, because the Manchu will not take no for an answer. If you do not dress and have your hair like them, if you do not consent to this tonsorial castration, they will kill you. However, that leads to the civil war to which you alluded, Dan. It takes them three decades to subdue South China, and largely because of this insistence that people who are really quite ready to abandon the Ming decide they're going to fight for their hair, although they wouldn't fight for their dynasty. largely because of this insistence that people who are really quite ready to abandon the Ming decide they're going to fight for their hair, although they wouldn't fight for their dynasty. It's an extraordinary story. It really is crossing the street to pick a fight. The Manchu didn't have

to do that. It's a foolish miscalculation. It's a good case of how humans can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. We've heard a bit of that in the 20th century and more recently. We've been allowed in the 20th century and more recently. If you listen to Dinosaur's History, we're talking about the climate cooling of the 17th century. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts. Because I'm interested in how Japan adapts to become more resilient.

The danger of pontificating about the 17th century is that you're using 21st century standards to judge 17th century problems. And so I became very interested in Japan. I visited there. I don't speak or read Japanese, so I pay to play. I found people who can speak and read Japanese to look at all the sources for me. And it's very clear that the Japanese have a remarkable formula for dealing with the same climatic problems that assail the rest of the world, that assail China, that assail Europe, that assail Northern Ireland and North America. There are episodes of extreme weather that kill perhaps half a million people in the 1640s. And they convince the rulers of Japan, a dynasty called the Tokugawa, to do some very sensible things. They create more state-run granaries, something that the English magistrates refused to do.

The English are offered the chance of creating granaries, and they say, no, we like capitalism. Well, the Tokugawa were not very sympathetic to that sort of argument. If you tried capitalism in Tokugawa, Japan, you were taken out and executed. They upgrade communications infrastructure so that you can get food to areas that are starving more rapidly. They avoid foreign wars. There's at least two occasions when, first of all, Ming loyalists come and say, you know, can you help us out here? You know, the Manchu are your enemies as well as ours. And the Shogun says, you know, I'd love to, chaps, but I hope my people are dying, the weather is terrible, we have all sorts of

supply problems here. I can't help you out. So they avoid foreign wars in order to accumulate sufficient food reserves to cope with future disasters. But they also implement, and this to me is very interesting, they also implement draconian domestic policies that we would never tolerate today. Let me give you two examples. First of all, they impose extreme measures of social control. The most celebrated one is you are not allowed to practice Christianity. If they catch you, whether you're a convert or a missionary, they torture you and then they crucify you. The second is they promote infanticide, which becomes a single response to short-run economic adversity because it is the quickest way to bring supply and demand into equilibrium.

You know, we have big discussions here about abortion in the United States. Can you imagine if the issue was infanticide? But that is what the Tokugawa government promotes. If you have too many children, kill them at birth. Don't add to the problem. So thanks to this cocktail of positive and negative measures, Japan after 1650 avoids the consequences of the Little Ice Age. The climate still changed, there are still early snowfalls. There's heavy frost. The crops are thin. But there are no more famines, no more rebellions,

no more mass mortality. Japan now has a sort of reputation for, and particularly in the build-up to the Second World War, of course, everyone dutifully doing what they're told and a sort of strong humanitarian spirit. In fact, at the beginning of the 16th century, Japan was quite anarchic. There was a perception they didn't have that.

It's the response to this crisis that kind of embeds that culture within, at the risk of being a sort of Orientalist, but sort of slightly embeds that culture within Japanese society. Japan has, how shall I put it, an advantage as they go into the Little Ice Age, and that is that their population has already been reduced by a century of civil wars, what Japanese historians called the Warring States period, in which there are, I mean, you think our civil war of the 1640s and 50s was bad. Well, Japan experiences that sort of internecine struggle for over a century, ending in the 1570s, 1580s, 1590s. And by that

time, the population is below optimum. China, by contrast, and Europe, by contrast, are already at the limits of the possible as far as population is concerned. So you could say that the Little Ice Age strikes in Japan, a country which already has some wiggle room. There's a cushion which can absorb some of the impact that is not true in other areas, where the benign climate of the 16th and early 17th century has enabled bumper crops, population to grow, etc., etc. We're talking about a global catastrophe. 17th century is the last really major change in global climate. There have been others.

There's clearly one in the 14th century associated with the Black Death, which occurs after a series of really terrible harvests. But we don't have the first-person narratives that we do for the 17th century. The 17th century is the most recent global episode of climate change, prolonged episode of climate change. And it's the first one for which we have a lot of first-person testimony. As I say, I don't read Japanese. I don't read Chinese either. I can read some European languages, but I tried to identify a single source, a single voice, to give a sort of vertebra to the narrative that I was saying, well, this happens here, this happens there. I tried to find a voice. It was not always the voice of a sufferer,

but it had to be a consistent voice. So in Japan, I found the diary of a salt merchant, a little bit north of Tokyo, kept a diary which happened to be very, very eloquent on the climatic changes he saw around him, seeing dead people in the street, waking up in the morning, and people seeing frozen to death in the fields. So I use him, Inamoto, Yasemon. I found a Japanese scholar who was willing to translate that for me. In Russia, there is only one foreign ambassador, the Swedish ambassador. So I tracked down his weekly dispatches from Moscow in the mid-17th century. They're in the Swedish archives. They're written in Swedish. So I found, again, I paid to play, and I found a Swedish scholar who was willing to translate them for me.

And in England, there was no shortage. But I tried to get, if you like, vertical soundings and horizontal soundings. The vertical soundings are one person in one place telling you what happened over time. The horizontal is seeing what happens across a wide spectrum at the same time. So it was a combination, which was the challenge. And I hope if you liked it, it means I got it time. So it was the combination which was the challenge. And I hope if you liked it, it means I got it right. But it was quite a struggle. And that's why it took me 35 years to bring the book to fruition. Geoffrey, if you had been at COP26, what would you have told them? I would have said, look at the records. I would perhaps have pointed to the Thames Barrier, that wonderful modern creation that was devised in the wake of the 1953 floods when I was 10 years

old, and was actually opened in 1982, and has been operated 100 times since then to protect central London from the floods, which are absolutely inevitable. And the way in which that came about was after 1953, the British government consulted its chief scientific advisor, a man called Herman Bondy, who was a mathematician. And they said, what should we do? How should we make sure this doesn't happen again? Bondi was very good on risk analysis. He considered the possibility of an asteroid striking central London. And he said, you know, it would be catastrophic. But number one, it's a very long shot. It's unpredictable. And there's nothing you could do about it. If an asteroid's coming and it's heading for

London, there's nothing you can do. But we do know that the rising floods in the Thames are inevitable and we can do something about it and we have to. And he reached that conclusion by looking at records. The record that convinced him was the high tides at London Bridge in storm surges. They're recorded since 1691. And he found out that by the 1950s, they were three feet higher than they had been in the 1690s. He said, I don't know why that happened, but it did. And it's going to continue. So unless you build a Thames barrier, you are going to have more and worse floods like the one in 1953. I would have said to COP26, you know, you need to look at the patterns of the past and start preparing.

If you wanted to avoid Hurricane Katrina, you should have started building barriers in the 1980s. If you wanted to avoid Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy, you should have started building barriers in the New York area in the 1990s. started building barriers in the New York area in the 1990s. It's like asparagus. If you wanted to eat good asparagus today, you should have planted the bed 10 years ago. It's like the Navy. If you wanted a first-class fleet, you should have started building it some time ago. It's always cheaper to prepare than to repair. And yet we are such a reactive and risk-averse society that we just have abdicated our responsibility to look at the past and find out that you need to anticipate what's going to happen on the basis what happened in the past and prepare for it and start now. I interview some historians on here who talk about how historians, this dialogue with the present, it's not about the present. It's not for them to weigh in on contemporary issues. The history is something maybe pure and distinct that happens and they want to write about the past. This book is all about today, isn't it? Is that the job of a

historian in your impression? Because that's what I think historians should be doing all the time. I want to hear more historians. I want historians weighing in on all these issues that we face today. Yes, I agree with you. I do think historians' voices should be heard on every issue under the sun. But there are some issues where it's rather more important. I think the history of racial injustice in the country in which I speak to you is one of them, and the country in which you are now. These are just as important as trying to figure out what to do about the climate changes which are happening now. I mean, how many extreme weather events does it take before we start taking it seriously? In the end, I think it's the insurance companies who are going to save us.

I think the insurance and the reinsurance companies are going to say, no, you cannot build there. It is too dangerous to build there. We are not going to rebuild your house so that the next flood tide, the next rise in sea level will destroy it. So we have to start all over again. I think the insurance companies will eventually focus our attention in a way that historians alone cannot. But insurance companies do look at the past. They do look at past records. And I think perhaps historians then should be talking a little bit more to the insurance companies, because politicians listen to the

insurance companies. Ordinary people listen to the insurance companies. If you see your insurance premium go up, it's going to make far more impact on you than anything I could say. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, the insurance companies and the fund managers. Paul Holmes Who would have thought down that we would be here praising insurance companies and fund managers? But in the end, you know, who do politicians listen to? Certainly not the people.

Steve McLaughlin I guess the last thing I would say, the thing that strikes me reading your work is what's so different about today is also the reason that we're in this mess. But we are able to transport harvests from parts of the world in which there is plenty to parts of the world in which there is not. We're able to support a population of billions and billions of people because of the internal combustion engine and all these things that have created this mess in the first place. that have created this mess in the first place. Do you take any satisfaction and optimism from the fact that the revolutions that occurred in and after the 17th century have made us more resilient to climate change than the people that you were writing about 350 years ago? They would make me more optimistic if we did anything about them. I mean, one of the chapters of my book is from warfare to welfare, the way in which the adversity of the mid-17th

century leads to a lot of scientific innovations. I believe the scientific revolution, to some extent, addresses the problems observed by scientists, by those who are expert and who care about these things, and they make our world more resilient. The problem is, we don't do enough about it. I mean, it's very good to know, as I said with Hurricane Katrina, everybody knew what was needed to save New Orleans in 2005. It just wasn't done. And even last year in 2020, when there were more hurricanes heading straight for New Orleans, okay, the city was saved because it had acted, but the areas around it were inundated because, well, it's a once in a century event, it's not worth it. So yes, you can know how to be resilient,

but the question is, will you actually do something about it? It costs money. But as I, I'm old, I repeat myself, but it is always cheaper to prepare than to repair. It's cheaper in lives, which cannot be brought back. And it's cheaper in property. And I'm somewhat mystified why we don't do more when we know the danger is coming. It's getting closer. As I said, how many extreme weather events will it take before we actually do something about the root cause? We're reacting to the symptoms. We are not addressing the root cause. Geoffrey, just so we don't leave it maybe on that slightly disturbing thought, what can we do?

Tell us what can we do as individuals, as voters, as activists? How can we make a positive impact? You know, that's a very hard question, Dan, but it is the relevant one. It's so easy to say what they should do. They should not fly as often. They should not drive their car as often. What should we do? And the answer, I think, is not be so wasteful. I think we all have to, what's the phrase that's so fashionable now, reduce our global footprint. That's to say, no, don't fly, don't drive if you don't have to. If you have to drive, get a car that doesn't pollute. We all have to contribute. We also have to agitate on our governments. There's something that only national governments can do, and they need to start doing

it. We need to be less suspicious. We need to be less opposed to initiatives from our national governments to try and make us safer. Going back to Japan, I'm not suggesting we go back to infanticide and executing grain hoarders. But I do think we need to be a little more receptive to advice on how we can address these problems, which affect all of us. We need, I'm not sure this is uplifting Dan, you asked me for an uplifting message and I don't really have one, but I do think that listening a little more carefully to what those who know tell us is going to be a benefit. Always dismissing, what was it

Michael Gove said, too many experts. Yeah, well, there's a reason they're experts. And experts make mistakes. But they also often get it right. So give them a chance. Give experts a chance. Give government a chance. Okay, thank you very much, Geoffrey. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you for asking me, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.