Comment: Signs of climate change are all around us in France 

There are people – even elected leaders of great nations – who say that human-generated climate change is a myth. 

The Earth goes through cycles of warming up and cooling down, according to them. 

It has happened before and it is nothing to worry about. We should not listen to the doomsday predictions of climatologists and green campaigners because they are fake news, part of a fun-spoiling conspiracy. 

The evidence for a so-called climate crisis, they insist, is not conclusive but contestable. 

They have even done their own research. Ditto, the case for radical action is overblown. We would be fools to give up flying and driving gas-guzzling vehicles on the basis of such iffy evidence, they conclude. 

I share these sceptics’ problems with the data. 

There is just so much of it and it is highly technical. The charts and graphs are bewildering; the books on the subject are nigh unreadable. 

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Almost all of us have only second-hand knowledge to go on. Few spend years of our lives measuring the depth of Arctic ice or the rate that Alpine glaciers are shrinking. 

Our prima facie choice, then, is to trust or not to trust experts. 

This is not the same thing as each person thinking what he or she wants. Everyone is not entitled to hold an inflexible opinion, if it is based on erroneous or questionable facts.

In our frenetically communicating era, knowledge has all but been replaced by belief. 

You are branded a fool if you do not take a stand on one side of the argument or the other, preach an incontrovertible truth, and stigmatise anyone who disagrees with you as beyond saving. 

There is only one way through this problem: to remember that we are humans and to use our own senses first hand – common sense as well, of course. 

Our great ability as a species is that we can compare notes, person to person, and assess each nugget of information without prejudice. 

I was in Valencia last year when the storm clouds came to a halt overhead and did overwhelming damage in a few short hours. This was not the first flood to hit the region. 

There was a serious one in 1957 but it was nothing like as violent as the DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or ‘cold drop’) of 2024. 

Was this an aberration or part of a ‘patternless pattern’ of chaotic weather that has developed at the same pace as globalisation consumes resources and pumps out contamination? 

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I cannot guarantee it was because of human-made climate change, but that has to be one of the possible explanations. 

It is established that the Mediterranean is warming up and storms of this kind are likely to be more and more violent. 

I am witness to other evidence. 

In south-west France over the past 20 years, we have had a succession of mild winters interspersed with exceptionally hot, dry summers that have killed conifers that were previously happy to grow around here.

I have seen trees and bushes flowering at all the wrong times and we have harvested peppers and tomatoes in November – unthinkable when we first arrived. 

For the past couple of years, the white bryony has defied its habit of growing only in early summer and carried on all year. 

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Mosquitoes, too, are surviving into winter. 

We should all be attentive to our own surroundings as we try to establish whether the experts are right or wrong. Take notes, keep a diary. 

While we are doing that, it would be prudent to adopt the working assumption that something really is going drastically wrong and scale back our climate-straining activities. 

It will do us no harm to live a bit less arrogantly, as our ancestors did.

Are there any big signs of climate change where you live? Have things changed for better or for worse? Let us know at letters@connexionfrance.com