Four Degrees More by Malcolm Rose

ONE
    East Anglia Reporter: Collapse of the house on the edge
    BBC News: The real cost of global warming

    My bedroom fell into the sea last year. I was watching on a safe part of the cliff, when the bit under my room gave way and ripped my house apart. A zigzag gash in thebrickwork opened wider and wider. Wood splintered like breaking bones and my bedroom separated from the rest. Strips of wallpaper flapped around, plaster cracked into pieces, and the whole lot tumbled down the cliff. By the time it splashed into the North Sea, it looked like a smashed bird’s nest. I remember my wardrobe door bobbing around on the waves, before I stomped away in a strop and kicked the four-by-four parked in the lay-by.
    I wasn’t the only one who saw my home break up. Someone filmed it on a mobile phone and sold the footage to the television people. It got played over and over again on the news. One moment, my room was perched on the edge of the cliff. The next, some of it was floating and the rest was sinking in an angry sea. I suppose that made my bedroom the most famous room inthe country for a while.
    I was thirteen at the time, and how did it make me feel? Never mind the sea being angry. It wasn’t as angry as me. Angry is too small a word for how I felt. My brain boiled. I blamed the sea for being too rough. I blamed the wind and tide for turning each wave into a battering ram. I blamed the East Anglia cliffs for being too crumbly. But the telly news called it the real cost of global warming.
    I did an environmental project at school. A few minutes on the internet told me that the TV got it right. It told me global warming was to blame for rising sea levels, stronger storms and coastal erosion. It also told me
who
to blame: oil and power companies, big business, the government, car drivers and air travellers, anybody with central heating and light bulbs and TVsand computers and every sort of plug-in electrical gadget. It was a very long list of anyone who uses energy. Really, it’s people who are to blame for my bedroom taking that dive. But particularly, people in transport and power, who burn fuel and pump out carbon dioxide like there’s no tomorrow. Made me glad I’d put a dent in that four-by-four.

    It wasn’t just a house that broke up. My family fell to pieces as well. I’m not blaming climate change for Dad walking out on us. That’d be silly. I guess it was the stress of living on the edge. By the time we had to move away from Happisburgh, Mum and Dad were at each other’s throats all the time. Another gash had opened wider and wider.
    Now, a year later, I live in Ipswich withMum and my old bedroom’s not so famous. I still see it collapse sometimes, though. I can close my eyes and replay every detail, but that’s not what I mean. Documentaries on global warming give it an airing now and again. Usually, it’s a slow-motion replay – a slow slide into the sea. It’s on the GreenWatch website as well.
    I’m never mentioned. No one ever says, ‘Poor Leyton Curry. There goes his bedroom.’ No one ever says, ‘I wonder what Leyton thinks about his personal space becoming a public display.’ To them, it’s just bricks, mortar and wood tumbling down. It’s funny. Maybe scary as well. No one ever asked my permission to use my room as proof that the country’s changing in a big way.
    It’s like when a goalkeeper makes a howler and the goal gets shown again andagain. It gets lots of hits on YouTube and appears on a DVD of the most embarrassing things ever in football. That’s my bedroom. Reduced to an
Oops!
moment on an environmental disaster DVD.
    Still, there’s nothing we can do about something as big as global warming, is there? We might as well just sit back and enjoy the sunshine – and the clip – one more time.
    Wrong. I can do something.

TWO
    ITV News: Terrorist threat causes Stansted chaos
    East Anglia Reporter: The Cooler strikes again

    I’m a one-person campaign. I can’t walk past a