Forget floods, molten summers, crop failures and all the other apocalyptic warnings. One only has to glance at a Heathrow Airport check-in queue to comprehend the most immediate and terrifying consequence of global warming on Britain.
If the words of environmental campaigners - and those of politicians keen to impose huge flight taxes - are to be taken seriously, hundreds of thousands of unkempt Britons will soon say adios to jaunts to Spain and unleash themselves on their own countryside. As global footprints are reduced, the moulds of all manner of distasteful footwear will impress themselves on this once green and pleasant land.
It is with this thought in mind that I head for Dorset, a much cherished corner of England, to see how far down this road we have already travelled. The county has achieved global recognition largely thanks to 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy, whose tragic tales of doomed individuals seem to have sprung from its chalky grasslands and Mesozoic cliffs. For the true Hardy aficionado
it seems inconceivable Roman Polanski shunned Dorset's hillocks and hedgerows as a location for his 1979 adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, starring Nastassja Kinski, in favour of the French countryside.
A warning that Hardyland is struggling to remain free of the forces of commercial modernism arrives on the morning of my trip. The television is abuzz with the news that a field next to the legendary chalk man of Cerne Abbas, a 60-metre figure carved out of a north Dorset hillside believed to date back to the Iron Age, has been embossed with a similar-sized form of Homer Simpson. Local druids are up in arms and performing rain rituals in the hope the painted monstrosity will disappear as fast as possible. Its creators have apparently taken a more scientific view and executed the stunt armed with the knowledge that no rain is forecast until after the imminent opening of The Simpsons Movie.
I feel confident, and with good reason, my particular destination - the vast sand-clay cliffs of Chesil Beach - would never fall victim to a similar wheeze. The stretch of coastline was chosen by contemporary writer Ian McEwan as the setting for his latest novella, On Chesil Beach. In an interview to promote the book, McEwan let slip he had removed a handful of pebbles from the beach for research purposes, apparently in contravention of a Dorset County Council preservation order. McEwan promptly returned the pebbles (with a film crew in tow to record the event), generating hectares more publicity for his book in the process.
Reading On Chesil Beach on Chesil Beach, it is easy to see why McEwan chose the area as the backdrop for his tale of a young virginal couple on their wedding night in 1962, the groom feverish in his anticipation, the bride paralysed with fear.