USED as we are to sudden and unpredictable weather here on our small group of islands, it’s all too easy to gloss over extreme events in parts of the world which are apparently less stable. We note their wildfires and droughts, but know it couldn’t happen here, could it? 

Complacency from our lofty perch is also seductive. We will be the first to net zero. And we can note the serious changes to monsoons and heat waves in, say, East Africa, scene of my first ever job, where it is a reality affecting the lives of millions of people in a more or less disastrous way. Global warming? Climate change? Actually, our food got cheaper and supplies are unaffected on our groaning supermarkets shelves. It is just a blip – it will rain in torrents next week.

What is perhaps more alarming is the growing body of evidence illustrating how climate change is likely to reveal itself in our temperate context. Temperatures continue to soar, but at the same time sea levels rise in what seems to us to represent no immediate threat. Climate experts see it differently. The ocean is becoming saltier and therefore denser and colder. In all probability this will affect the principal driver of UK climate, the Gulf Stream. Changes to this flow of warm, predictable ocean water coming from the tropics have the capacity to change things in a more damaging way. Colder, denser water can replace our established order in a disruptive and irreversible way, changing our climate to one closer to that of Scandinavia from that of the Med.

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And what about El Nino? And all the other deep-water currents all over the globe? Climate change is happening over there very much as predicted, it seems to me.

Not too much gloom for you, especially in November, the gloomiest month of the year, very much living up to its reputation as I peer out into a cold, misty morning. Humanity has a way of analysing and researching its problems, aided perhaps as never before by AI and computer science in general. We’ll find a way. We already know how to pump carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and how to use sulphur of all things to seed the clouds and produce rain.

All the current science seems to come at a price. No doubt that will change as global warming moves up the list of priorities, perhaps even overtaking winter fuel subsidies for pensioners.

Remember yonder peasant? All branches of science perhaps, bar one. How can we safeguard our environment at the same time? Yes, you’ve guessed it. Trees, trees and more trees.Which we foresters know all about. And should, surely, be taking the lead.

It’s up to us. But it has to be said that we in the UK are a very long way off giving any sort of leadership to a concerted move to plant more. As a first simple step, can’t we pressure our government to get our undervalued and underfunded forest research to involve us in what is, actually, a policy which addresses land use and land ownership based on a far more creative, imaginative and, above all, coordinated approach?

Not perhaps what we seem to be adopting. Yonder peasant will, no doubt, be just one of those fortunate few to find a dwelling as part of the million new homes we are promised. All energy efficient, heated no doubt by humankind’s oldest fuel, which comes, I won’t need to remind you, from trees.

“Sire, he lives a good league hence. Underneath the mountain.” Which is covered not with trees – certainly not Sitka spruce – but with highly subsidised sheep, which I’d like to bet don’t figure too highly on your menu (and even when they do, come from New Zealand). Are you ready? All together now: “Good King, etc, etc...”

We are currently suffering from local flooding, which gives me a chance to catch up on the news.

Here we go again. Some official-sounding body now wants to ban woodfuel on the grounds that the burning of wood in domestic woodburners is going to cause atmospheric pollution, sickness and death. So we need now to rip out the 600,000 stoves (can this be right? Really?) installed in the new housing stock and concentrate on heat pumps which don’t use wood – well, not directly.

So it’s really farewell Drax. And it’s all systems change for our firewood industry. Or is all of this just another set of ill-thought-out, publicity-seeking nonsense? You decide please.