British people urged to make emergency preparations before next year's weather starts its deadly onslaught

A harrowing warning from our representatives in today’s paper:

British people have been urged to have enough food and water on hand to survive a few days without power or water, as the UN said the El Niño climate phenomenon was “supersizing before our eyes”, exacerbating extreme weather events worldwide.

Forecasters say they are braced for the biggest El Niño in 1,000 years, bringing wildfires and floods to parts of the world, and the threat of a wet, stormy winter for the UK.

El Niño is of course a natural phenomena in the sense of its existence, but human-created climate change is making its effects all that much worse:

El Niño climate patterns supercharged by burning of fossil fuels, study finds

And of course the heating effect we’re now expecting it to create is on top of the ever increasing, ever more dangerous, temperature our behaviour is already causing:

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

Next year is going to be even more unpleasant than the one we’re already in. People will die in the UK. Far more will die in other more affected, more vulnerable countries. Whether or not we learn anything from that that actually changes our behaviour in a substantial way remains to be seen.

I can’t say I’m hopeful in a world where one of Britain’s most popular political parties is ridden with fossil-fuel funded high-ups who continue to verge between denying climate change in contrary to all obvious evidence and claiming it’s a good thing because it might make British wine a bit better. Insane stuff. These people cannot be allowed anywhere near the reins of power. And the rest of the parties need to lead us in a far, far better than we’ve seen to date.