it's my birthday and that makes me especially vulnerable to the news (and cynical about happy endings)

on what the billionaire death cult is suppressing plus The Devil Wears Prada 2

Is AI really using up all the world’s drinking water, my daughter asked me after school one recent afternoon and I wondered what I could say in response. I knew it wasn’t entirely accurate to say yes but no wouldn’t have been right, either. Where did you get that from, I said, and she told me it was on the internet. Which website? To this, I got the kind of vague answer an 11 year old gives when asked a question like that: I searched it up.

This meant she typed her question into Google and read the AI-generated results at the top so there was no source in the traditional sense for the answer she was given. She wouldn’t have done the thing I try to remember to do, which is to type -AI at the end of my searches so that actual websites appear in the search results, therefore her question may well have had an unfortunate consequence, drinking-water wise. It was a Black Mirror moment the likes of which there are so many these days: Child asks AI if AI is impacting global water security and AI (probably) says no.

I asked her why she searched it up. Had she seen something on Newsround? Her face — which oscillates between the childlike one she has had all this time and the grown-up one that is being chiselled out of it — darkened. No, she said. It was just in my mind.

What was the answer? I asked. Is it?

I don’t know, she replied. I couldn’t understand what it said so I’m asking you.

I remember what it was to be just a bit younger than she is now and experiencing my first wave of environmental panic. It came about during an episode of children’s wildlife programme, The Really Wild Show, while watching a feature presented by — let’s say — Michaela Strachan. The feature was about the hole in the ozone layer which had been mostly caused by CFCs. I’m sure Michaela would have been then as she is now, a comforting voice in globally uncertain times, and would have done an admirable job of watering down the science on the calamitous impacts of greenhouse gases for her young audience, but despite any reassurances, I was a mess.

It was 1992, my family had broken up and now the world was also ending.

What followed was a time of intense climate anxiety that couldn’t fairly be separated from our vulnerable housing situation. I don’t know if I knew to worry over whether we’d have a roof over our heads come autumn and if I was consciously worrying, it would have most probably been over what roof it might be. I asked for a Friends of the Earth letter writing set for my ninth birthday and got that plus a new schoolbag and an electronic diary which meant my mother was feeling bad about the way things had turned out. She certainly wasn’t thinking that her newly-environmentally-concerned child might object to the purchase of unnecessary extras, particularly those filled with some of the world’s rarer elements. And did I even object? When presented with this battery-operated treasure, most definitely not.

Later in the week, my husband told me he’d WhatsApped me a link to an article by a respected journalist and environmental activist whom we both follow. In between the making and drinking of coffee, the filling of packed lunches, the brushing of teeth and so on, he paraphrased the main point which is that by the end of the century, there’s a 50% chance that an Atlantic system crucial to life as we know it will collapse. It will happen faster than humans will be able to adapt and have consequences for every living thing on earth.

For months of the year, Edinburgh could be -48C he said, recalling the most geographically-resonant example from the climate scientists’ predictions. I said how awful that sounded while moments from the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow came to mind, specifically the scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is in the New York Public Library feeding rare and antiquated books into the fire so he and his fellow survivors will, indeed, survive the sudden deep freeze. There would be no need of the knowledge accrued and archived from the old world in the new, that was for sure.

My husband told me that the journalist was angry that this sort of climate story is systemically suppressed by mainstream media, and I felt a fresh wave of anger at who the journalist called the billionaire death cult as well. I never thought I’d become the sort of person who would grow to distrust the news as it’s reported on telly and in newspapers but it seems that people and times do indeed change.

Soon after, I was enjoying a final cup of coffee in the garden hearing — variously — birdsong, petrol-powered garden tools and passing cars on the road outside. The familiar sounds of the suburbs were underscored by the constant thrum of motorway traffic a mile or so away. ‘Twas ever thus and ever thus shall be or, in other words, it sounded like it has always sounded at this time of year or, in yet other words, it sounded like it has sounded to me in each of the 14 springs I’ve spent in this garden if not the way it sounded for most of the 165 years that this house has stood at the top of this hill.

The welcome sun was beating down on the peak of my baseball cap in a way that made me feel guilty about the flowerpots, full of weeds at the back door. I reminded myself there would be an overnight frost or two yet, and that I would attend to the pots around the second May Bank Holiday like every other sensible Scottish gardener. It was then that I picked up my phone, clicked through to the article and saw that my husband had misremembered the headline point. There’s a 50% chance of us arriving at a tipping point by 2050, not 2100 when everyone living under this roof, he had said, would be long gone at least.

In the 2050s we’ll be in our 70s, if we’re spared. Our children will be in their 40s. When I was 9, 10, 11 or thereabouts, and irrespective of the state of the ozone layer, there’s no way my mother would have thought to prepare me for an adulthood that would be less prosperous, less healthy and less happy than hers or her parents’ before her. Maybe that says as much about my mother as it does about parenting in the early 90s.

Or maybe it says a lot about what it means to live with any degree of awareness in the year of our Lord 2026. The kind of global cooperation required to phase out and ban CFCs feels very far away in a world where the broligarchy is in charge and furthering the climate agenda is so far from any government’s priority.

Yesterday was my 43rd birthday and I chose to spend part of it in the cinema with my family watching The Devil Wears Prada 2. The night before, I watched the original with my kids and felt newly aligned with the Devil herself. I won’t provide additional commentary to the very important points made elsewhere about how the 2006 incarnation of Miranda Priestley is deserving of a perimenopausal reinterpretation, but I will say that AI gets more than a look-in in the sequel and that the glittering, “forever” future all-but promised to serious journalist Andi Sachs at the end of the first film is, at least for significant portions of the new film, hanging on a shaky (coat) peg.

We left the cinema asking one another whose job we would most like to have when we’re older, since even adults in their mid-to-late 40s can have dreams. I said Andi’s. One of my kids said Lady Gaga’s. The other said Miranda Priestley’s, but mostly because of the corner office, the two PAs and all the coffees. Yet what I was left with was the fact that the film exposed the fragility — nay — the impossibility of any of these roles existing in a recognisable form in the AI world, let alone these glossy, aspirational versions, of course. We don’t know what work will look like in 20 years, I tell them, hoping this vague yet hopeful response would be enough for them on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, while thinking that the realistic scenario is that AI is coming for their career aspirations, our drinking water and much else besides. The worst case is that we are wiped out by suddenly rising sea levels and/or the arrival of the next ice age. I won’t throw in global conflicts too. Not today anyway.

Back home, I sat in the garden and drank two tins of wine on an empty stomach thinking about how fucked it all is. Oh how 2006 and 2026 of me. If this was a film and not real life, then being forced indoors by an unexpected heavy downpour would be the sobering moment towards the end in which the heroine pulled herself together, opened her laptop and wrote something that might solve or at least soothe the situation, but this is not a film and there really is nothing that will soothe or solve. You might want to blame the pre-hangover for the maudlin tone of this piece but I must tell you, much of it was drafted days ago.

When we watch a romcom, or even a disaster movie, we want and expect a happy ending. Even when we read an article about the probable and catastrophic impacts of climate breakdown, we still expect a glimmer at the end because it allows for our discomfort to pass and means we can get on with feeling the sun on our face, bringing up our children or whatever it is that fills our waking hours and our brains. You're expecting one now, aren't you, since we all perform a version of the billionaire death cult media owners with our “but look at the blossom. Smell the azaelias, spring insists on rolling round again in spite of it all”. Yeah, I can see and smell it too but is telling you that helping?

I know it’s probably not brilliant that when my children talk casually and easily about their futures, I play the devil’s advocate. I say things like, You know you don’t have to get married, don’t you? And you don’t have to have children?

Or maybe it’s worse when I lie and say that it’s exciting to imagine what's ahead? That AI will advance to become less energy-hungry and work for us not against us? That climate catastrophe can and will be averted? That the worst-case scenarios will not come to pass.

Other futures exist, I say like it’ll all work itself out, somehow. But, really, how?