Our climate is changing rapidly – and our politicians sound increasingly surreal | Zoe Williams

On a panel show last week, everyone in the audience wanted to talk about the climate emergency, but the lines rolled out by a Tory MP simply dissolved on contact with reality As it is August, and everyone with stronger opinions is currently on holiday, last week I went on Any Questions? , the BBC Radio 4 panel show.

I had prepared beforehand with a friend whose life’s work it is to make sure people don’t say anything stupid on the radio (or TV), and we’d talked about everything – the strait of Hormuz and energy prices; bus fare caps and the relative price of eggs; racism in the press and in public life; the AI bubble and the next financial crash; how many bathrooms Harry and Meghan currently have in the US, and whether a property even exists in the UK with that amount of toileting hardware.

Predictably, perhaps, the audience’s questions did not spread themselves neatly across the full suite of current affairs, though Harry and Meghan’s return did come up – it was more a matter of which question about the climate crisis best represented the fact that everyone wanted to talk about the climate crisis.

The news had just dropped that El Niño would deliver us an unprecedentedly wet autumn , but that was unlikely to soothe the parched earth of the record-breakingly hot, dry summer.

Crops are failing, the land is on fire and nobody has not noticed.

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