J G Ballard reviews High Tide 18 March 04

“Have exaggerated fears about the weather replaced our dread of nuclear war?” So asks the renowned novelist J G Ballard at the start of his Evening Standard review of my book High Tide. Ballard is clearly no sceptic: indeed he acknowledges that “melting ice-caps, coastal flooding and the creation of vast new deserts threaten our entire way of life”. Indeed, climate catastrophe is “a harrowing prospect, brilliantly set out by Lynas”. So far so good. But my contention that “for most city dwellers, cars are an unnecessary luxury” raises Ballard’s hackles. My solutions to climate change, he claims, “are more apocalyptic than the problem”. Why? Because “most of us prefer our sun-loungers and traffic jams, and will lie back contentedly until the Tarmac begins to boil off our roads, gazing at our banana trees and thoroughly enjoying the direst warnings in well-intentioned but somehow overwrought books like this one”. Hmmmm. I must admit, this leaves me a trifle confused. Is Ballard advocating anything other than a sort of paralysed fatalism? It doesn’t seem so.