Convenience Big Store: Climate change: let’s learn from the pandemic

13 August, 2021

Hello,

Here are a few more highlights from this week's issue of The Knowledge, now available on the website and the app. Android users can download the app here. If you'd like to have full access and read all our stories, subscribe here for a free trial.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Climate change

Let's learn from the pandemic

"The apocalypse has already arrived," says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. I'm writing, "drenched in sweat", from my ancestral village in Corfu, where we're enduring Greece's worst heatwave in 34 years. At least I'm not on the island of Evia, where wildfires have turned thousands of acres of forest to ash and thousands of villagers into refugees. On Wednesday the highest temperature in European history, 48.8C, was recorded in Sicily.

The "burning Mediterranean" provides a grimly appropriate backdrop to the 3,949-page report published on Monday by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The COP26 summit in Glasgow in November aims to limit global warming to 1.5C, but the IPCC says we'll overshoot it. As the report shows, "southern Europe is drying out while northern Europe is getting wetter, leading to anomalous and devastating floods like those in Germany and even London this summer". António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, summed it up as "code red for humanity". How long will my two young sons be able to live safely in our homeland? It doesn't seem fanciful to imagine Greek climate refugees within Europe "joining the desperate masses pressing on the continent from outside".

All the "fire and brimstone" talk is overdone, says The Wall Street Journal. Since its last report in 2013, the IPCC has revised the likely upper limit of global warming from 4.5C to 4C. The new report has "low confidence" that Antarctic Sea ice will melt, and its linkage of warming to hurricanes, heatwaves and floods is based on computer models that will need to be examined by independent experts. It's a "political document", designed to grab attention, and it certainly doesn't justify big government intervention.

I worry that the grim news "will prompt apathy rather than action", says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. "We're all doomed, so why bother fighting it?" Oddly, the pandemic has given me hope. In less than two years we've created and distributed multiple vaccines for a previously unknown virus. Proximity to disaster can change minds and prompt drastic action: compare the "sluggish" vaccine rollout in Australia, where Covid infections have remained low, to Britain's speedy campaign amid sky-high cases.

These 50ft walls of fire in our own backyard should spur us to get our act together. There's already a "green vortex" under way, with institutions starting to decarbonise before legislation forces them to. And the pandemic didn't cause society to break down. "In the face of existential threats, most of us are co-operative, kind and resilient." Human ingenuity, which led us down from the trees and up to the moon, can save us – if we're bold enough to use it.

Life

Sarah, Duchess of York. David Levenson/Getty Images

Thoughtfulness is my middle name

"To say Sarah Ferguson is unlike a typical interviewee is to say a monsoon is unlike an April shower," says Henry Mance in the FT. The Duchess of York arrives for lunch more prepared than I am. "I've read every single one of your interviews," she says. How thoughtful. "Thoughtfulness is my middle name."

She's promoting Her Heart for a Compass, her Mills & Boon romance novel about a red-haired aristocrat who is ostracised by the nobility and harried by the press. Sounds familiar. After she divorced Prince Andrew in 1996, Ferguson was tabloid fodder. Still, it could have been worse. "I'm lucky I wasn't locked up." If she'd been born earlier, she would have been: "I would have been hysterical, and mad, and a witch and burnt." Normally you don't divorce a royal and keep your head. "Anne Boleyn didn't! I'm the only divorced woman who is still alive."

Thankfully, she and Andrew are the "happiest divorced couple in the world". They even live together at his official residence, Royal Lodge. "I have my rooms. He's that side and I'm this side." Individual sides? "Have you seen Royal Lodge? It's quite big…"

Individual "sides" aside, she insists her life isn't glamorous. "You've just got to get on with it. I suppose that's who I am, Henry. It's not a pony club, it's not hearty, I'm not a Sloane Ranger, I just am me." Can she go to the supermarket? "Yes." Does she go to the supermarket? "I could do." So she has a cook? "I don't cook, shan't cook, won't cook."

Did she think Andrew's Newsnight interview was a good idea? "Drop it, Henry, drop it." Before he goes, Mance notices the smoking slippers she's wearing, which are embroidered with "Never Explain" and "Never Complain".

❤️ 🧭 👻 I wonder how much of this bodice-ripper Fergie actually wrote, says Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday. "In tiny type on an inner page are the words 'With Marguerite Kaye'." A little investigation reveals that Kaye is a veteran Mills & Boon author who has written 55 novels and knocks out 8,000 words a day – "the equivalent of War and Peace every 10 weeks or so." In her acknowledgements, Fergie thanks Kaye for being "the mentor who guided me along the peregrinations of this literary journey". Well, says Brown, "as the word 'peregrination' means a journey, that sentence doesn't make much sense, but, then again, that's probably why she needed a mentor".

Property

THE HIDEAWAY This 400-year-old villa is on a hillside surrounded by olive groves on the Lustica peninsula, Montenegro. It has five bedrooms, a pool and a pergola in the Mediterranean garden, a covered veranda and views of the Bay of Kotor. Tivat airport is half an hour away. €980,000.

Staying young

A 55-year-old nun from New Jersey has gone viral on TikTok after sharing her tips for youthful skin, says the Daily Mail. Sister Monica racked up more than 82,000 followers and 544,000 likes with her advice that beauty products are a "rip-off", parasols should be used in the sun and a cheap oatmeal baby bodywash by Aveeno is all that's needed to cleanse your skin. She added: "Not gonna lie. I think the absence of relationship stress helps."

Podcast

Frank Jr with his father and mother, Nancy, in 1967. Darlene Hammond/Getty Images

"God told me to kidnap Frank Sinatra Jr"

Frank Sinatra's son was abducted in 1963, says John Stamos in his podcast series The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra. His kidnapper was Barry Keenan, a mentally ill young man from Los Angeles who had fallen on hard times. At 21 he was making a killing at the LA stock exchange, but a car accident left him an "unemployable drug addict" with a damaged back, hooked on drink and painkillers. His once wealthy father was bankrupt and his mother was suicidal. One day, when he was high, God told him a lucrative kidnapping was the answer to his family's troubles. He took His word for it.

With the help of two friends, Keenan abducted 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr from a hotel room at gunpoint. All three were inept criminals and the kidnapping was a comedy of errors. They even turned down Sinatra's offer of a $1m ransom, insisting that $240,000 was enough. Having safely released Frank Jr, they were arrested by the FBI and sent to prison. Keenan was declared "insane" at the time of the crime and released after four and a half years. He reinvented himself as a successful real-estate developer, befriended George and Laura Bush, and even chatted backstage with Frank Jr at a concert – although he didn't reveal his identity.

Listen to The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra here.

On the money

👗 💷 High-street retailers are charging customers up to 100% more for visiting a shop rather than buying online, says The Sunday Times. Last week an H&M skirt was £12 online, but £18 in store. WHSmith was selling the Nadiya Bakes cookbook for £11 on its websites, but double that in store, while Casio calculators were 70% pricier. Bestsellers at Waterstones were up to 20% cheaper online. Retailers often slash prices on their websites to compete with Amazon.