Last week, the Prof whisked me off to Northumberland for a few days to celebrate my birthday. She had found us a gorgeous ‘eco-studio’ (passive solar heating plus heat pump, natural materials, deep daylighting etc) overlooking the cute village of Alnmouth. The small building was designed perfectly so you could lie in bed in the morning with a coffee and watch the sun rise over the village and the North Sea beyond.

Alnmouth, as the name suggests, sits at the mouth of the river Aln at the tip of a ridge of terminal moraine deposited during the last ice age. On the other side of the river is a continuation of the ridge – a small hill with a cross on top, known as Church Hill. But, why would you build a church there, given it’s about a three mile walk around the estuary from the village?

Well, for thousands of years the Aln looped around Church Hill with supposedly terra firma between the village and its church. Until, on Christmas Day 1806, following an overnight storm, the villagers woke to find the river had punched through the gap to cut off the Hill from the village – and the dilapidated church had been destroyed by the high winds. You could imagine the shock of the residents as overnight everything they knew had changed, laden with apparent religious symbolism – many must have thought they had offended God.

I mused on this as we lazed, reading and drinking more coffee in the little sun trap at the front of the studio. I had to look up who said change happens ‘gradually, then suddenly’ – it was a character in a Hemingway novel talking about going bankrupt. We think of river erosion taking centuries or millennia to change the landscape in tiny incremental little bites, but sometimes massive change can happen in just hours.

This is the big fear over climate change. We are currently in the ‘boiling a frog’ stage where the signal is there amongst the noise, but you have to go looking for it – eg analysing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather. But if we hit a number of tipping points, eg releasing bubbles of methane trapped in melting permafrost, things could go south very quickly indeed.

But there’s an optimistic side to this phenomenon: after decades of slogging through the ‘hard yards’ of the low carbon transition, will things suddenly come together and change accelerate rapidly?

Think of the most revolutionary product of this millennium – the iPhone. All the technologies in the classic Smartphone have been available in one form or another for decades (I could have bought a touch screen peripheral for my BBC Micro in the early 80s if I could have thought of a use for it), but the iPhone fused them together in an elegant way that opened the mobile digital world to the masses. And nothing has been the same since eg almost all our podcast listens are on mobile devices.

Another example is Zoom. I signed up to Zoom in early 2000 as it was half the price and about 20 times better than my former webinar provider, Webex. Then Covid hit and Zoom was perfectly positioned to go stratospheric, at least until Teams started to dominate (much to my annoyance, Zoom is far better). But teleconferencing went from a quirk to mainstream almost overnight.

The same has, will and could happen with low carbon technologies as adoption leads to improved quality and falling prices, leading to those technologies starting to dominate. The low carbon equivalents of the iPhone and Zoom will suddenly be on everyone’s lips and old technologies will fade into the history books. This is why we have to keep on pushing for positive change despite everything going on in the world. We never know when we will burst through the barriers, like the Aln on that night in 1806, and everything will be different.