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More than 3,000 properties on the Kent coast will be devastated by flooding without improved sea defences, warned a report last year.
Schools, health centres and electricity sub-stations could be among the buildings destroyed at a cost of more than half a billion pounds, suggested the study, if work is not undertaken during the course of the next century to protect Whitstable from the ‘mercy of rising sea levels’.
Now be honest.
When you read the second line - and realised this was forecast danger that could be 100 years away - did any rising panic you might have initially felt subside?
And that a worst case scenario which might only happen many, many decades from now wasn’t suddenly the immediately pressing local issue you feared it was?
Me too.
But now, when I turn on the television to horrifying footage of LA burning before our very eyes, I question whether we’re panicked enough?
Seasons in LA - we know from friends and family living that side of the pond - have been getting considerably drier and warmer each year.
It’s a useful argument when people are trying to persuade you to spend hundreds of pounds to pay them a visit - the promise of a chance to escape the damp British weather for something considerably more tropical at almost any time of year.
And then for the past eight months, there’s been more or less no rain at all.
Parts of California swung into a drought and the rest - while one day will be history - is currently playing out on live TV.
In 2006 former Vice President Al Gore released his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth - calling attention to the threat of climate change.
Almost 20 years later the American state with the biggest population has whole suburbs that have burnt to the ground and a death toll that will only rise.
Significant suburban sprawl in areas prone to wildfires, dry arid conditions caused by climate change then made worse by prolonged Santa Ana winds - LA’s blazes are said to be the worst case scenario that experts both feared and anticipated.
Can’t the same be said for many parts of Kent where warnings are frequently sounded about the risks posed to homes and businesses from the threat of rising water?
What is happening in Los Angeles is very much our future.
And it should be serving as another wake up call to anyone in denial about the dangers climate change will pose to us all in the years ahead.