I’ve got to hand it to Simon Cooper, purveyor of fine fishings (at a fine price) and house polemicist of Trout and Salmon, he’s lately provided quite of lot fodder for this blog. His magazine columns are like so many of those ill-informed and misleading opinion pieces in the tabloids. In the October edition he thunders about chalk streams and climate change, not as you might expect on the threat of higher temperatures but how a warming climate is nothing to worry about. In his attack on a Daily Mirror article, he complains of ‘dog whistle phrases’ such as ‘more heatwaves’ and ‘climate emergency’. The expression ‘dog whistle’ refers to insidious communication but there is nothing hidden or deceitful to pointing out the obvious. The climate really has begun to change rapidly.
Maybe Cooper doesn’t feel the heat but he must be aware our summers are getting hotter. Last year 40 degrees was hit for the first time. Chalk stream temperatures rose in places to 20 degrees, the point at which trout begin to struggle; some angling clubs banned fishing. He is remarkably insouciant if he believes these changes, never mind all the other global impacts, do not constitute an emergency. It seems that far more than dog whistles are beyond his perception.
Cooper’s attitude is a good example of the phenomenon of simplism, a term coined for the current tendency to oversimplify or to propound simple solutions to complex problems. Climate change science is certainly complex and too many can’t be bothered to read up about it, preferring instead to get their (mis)information from rants and slogans on social media. But you don’t get anything useful from the fruitcakes who fritter away their lives online. Details certainly don’t trouble Simon’s equilibrium. He claims that the south of England gets a ‘steady 32 inches of rain a year’. In fact it’s less, about 28 inches give or take 4 inches. But that isn’t the point. Added to higher mean temperatures, rainfall is predicted to become more concentrated, that is droughts and storms more extreme . Drier summers and stormier winters do not make a good climate for chalk stream health. Cooper’s other ‘killer fact’ (the death of all understanding?) is that we only need 6 inches of rain a year to match our water consumption. No mention of where this figure comes from. The problem of course is not so much the rainfall but the storage of water for consumption without draining the aquifers that supply the chalk rivers. He has nothing to offer here either.
All is simple in Simon’s world. His truth is whatever allows him to carry on without a guilty conscience. If there is no climate problem, he tells himself, he can go on driving his hefty gas-guzzling SUV, carry on stocking trout fed from the products of marine fisheries, already grossly overfished, and safely ignore anything else that might disturb his comfortable existence. Unfortunately for us all, the real truth is that climate change is happening at the fast end predicted by the scientists; only those with their heads buried deep in the sand will not see. Chalk streams, though many are still good fly fisheries for the moment, will be the earliest to suffer. Cooper’s rent-a-rod business will shrivel alongside them. His denial of the obvious will not prevent this. Simple, Simon.
The Secret Angler 