The Guardian With apologies to the residents of Uckfield, Lamberhurst, Lewes and a host of other villages and towns across southern England who are surveying the mud-silted wreckage of their homes and businesses this morning, the floods couldn't have come at a better time. The timing is excellent. We are only a month away from the Hague convention on climate change when the promises of Kyoto are supposed to be nailed down, and there is a real danger that the convention will go belly-up, in large part owing to US truculence.
Climate change induces a strange apathy.
Everyone knows about it, few people do anything about it. An air of unreality has settled over the whole subject. Yet even Kyoto may prove impossible. A decade after it was universally accepted that climate change was caused by carbon emissions, they are still rising. Not even scare stories seem to have had much effect.