The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes Author: David Shukman ISBN-13: 978-1529144284 Publisher: Witness Books Guideline Price: £25How do environmental journalists convince the public that climate change really is an existential crisis? As the former BBC science editor David Shukman admits in this sombre but urgent polemic, he has often failed to find a satisfactory answer. Language such as “carbon footprint” and “greenhouse gases” is too abstract, the newly independent consultant now realises, while his broadcasts from an Antarctic crevasse or an Amazonian rainforest “portrayed global warming as a problem for distant parts of the world, not people watching television in Britain”.The Response is Shukman’s most determined effort yet to shatter their complacency. Even European countries that regard themselves as temperate, he warns, must start bracing for an era of increasingly deadly storms, wildfires and heatwaves. “No longer is this about graphs or polar bears. It’s about you and your home.”While Shukman builds his case through a mixture of case studies and data analysis, he is still a reporter at heart. The Response begins with his blow-by-blow account of the grassland blazes that surrounded London in July 2022, causing its fire brigade to run out of engines for the first time since the second World War. From there he forensically exposes the UK’s leaky drainage system, its air pollution that has inflicted asthma on more than a million children and its vulnerability to global supply chains already threatened by extreme weather. Various “what if?” scenarios are presented in gloomy detail, involving empty supermarkets, mass evacuations and social unrest.Shukman’s patchwork approach makes The Response a frustratingly bumpy read. His technical explanations of how Britain could benefit from better urban planning may be persuasive, but do not exactly set the pulse racing. More memorable are his interviews with bereaved parents and survivors of recent natural disasters, including a Hampstead pensioner whose basement flat was flooded by sewage water that rapidly rose to his chest (a rescue team arrived after he phoned his sister to say goodbye). Most importantly, the author provides a wealth of evidence to support his conclusion that Britain’s “unhappy jumble” of public and private safety authorities is woefully unprepared for a surge in climate emergencies. Irish readers should feel equally nervous.During Shukman’s BBC career, he wryly recalls, one columnist labelled him “a warmist warhorse”. This uneven but laudable piece of investigative journalism shows why he refuses to leave the battlefield.