Like many other members of the blogosphere, I was all geared up to comment on David Cameron's long-awaited speech on Europe, but it has been postponed. Instead, a few thoughts on one event that did take place today as anticipated - the substantial snowfall that has blanketed much of England.
Here in rural Gloucestershire, we've got loads of the stuff. and very pretty it looks too. I'll try to post a picture tomorrow, as I don't see it melting any time soon. In a nearby village, sledges and toboggans were in evidence, and a massive snowball that fortunately wasn't aimed at me!
I remember wondering 20 years ago if we would ever see such scenes in Britain again. I lived in East Sussex at the tine, and after three snowy winters in 1985-7, we then had almost a decade with virtually no snow. There was the infamous "wrong kind of snow" of February 1991, when I was engaged in computer contract work in the Croydon area, and the trains did not cope very well to put it mildly. Apart from that, I can hardly remember any snowfall between February 1987 and December 1996. There was a bit in mid-February 1994 on the upper reaches of the Sussex High Weald - I remember driving through large snowflakes coming down from Old Heathfield, but by the time I reached my then home town of Hailsham, it was only sleet. This and a dusting of snow in early 1996 were the nearest we came to anything like snow in over five years.
By contrast, since we moved out of Hailsham in December 2003, snow has fallen in every subsequent winter. Even those two exceptionally mild winters of 2006/7 and 2007/8 saw snowfall in Sussex - in the latter case falling as late as April. We haven't managed a white Christmas since 1970, but there was lying snow on 25th December 2010 - the first time in over twenty years.
Now this is only my anecdotal evidence, but being something of a weather anorak, I am pretty sure my memory is not deceiving me. However, proponents of global warming are still bearting their drum as loudly as ever. 2012, we are told, was one of the ten warmest years ever. Not in Gloucestershire it wasn't! Apart from late May and early September, I seem to have spent most of the year feeling cold.
Of course, say the "experts", global warming doesn't mean everywhere getting hotter all the time. Yes, fine, but these days if we get more rain, less rain, colder temperatures, warmer temperatures it's always global warming that's allegedly the culprit. One cannot but become rather cynical. I can't speak for Sussex in 2013, as I don't live there now, but I do have in my possession the Sussex Weather Book. by Bob Ogley, Ian Currie and Mark Davison, which reviews the county's weather since 1066, and it seems like there's nothing new under the sun - a September heatwave in 1906 which touched over 30 degrees centigrade, barely 11 inches of rain at Icklesham in 1921, a frost-free December in 1934 and no one bellyaching about global waming in those days. What would today's climate doomsters have made of the great storms of 1250 and 1287, which completely obliterated the island town of Winchelsea, neccessitating its complete rebuilding on its present site?
By the time of these two great storms, it had been over 200 years since King Canute (or Knut) proved to his fawning courtiers, possibly also in Sussex, on the beach at Bosham, that political power does not extend to control of the elements. Why in this supposedly more enlightened age anyone can believe that surrendering further power to our present politicians will solve our weather problems is beyond me.
Here in rural Gloucestershire, we've got loads of the stuff. and very pretty it looks too. I'll try to post a picture tomorrow, as I don't see it melting any time soon. In a nearby village, sledges and toboggans were in evidence, and a massive snowball that fortunately wasn't aimed at me!
I remember wondering 20 years ago if we would ever see such scenes in Britain again. I lived in East Sussex at the tine, and after three snowy winters in 1985-7, we then had almost a decade with virtually no snow. There was the infamous "wrong kind of snow" of February 1991, when I was engaged in computer contract work in the Croydon area, and the trains did not cope very well to put it mildly. Apart from that, I can hardly remember any snowfall between February 1987 and December 1996. There was a bit in mid-February 1994 on the upper reaches of the Sussex High Weald - I remember driving through large snowflakes coming down from Old Heathfield, but by the time I reached my then home town of Hailsham, it was only sleet. This and a dusting of snow in early 1996 were the nearest we came to anything like snow in over five years.
By contrast, since we moved out of Hailsham in December 2003, snow has fallen in every subsequent winter. Even those two exceptionally mild winters of 2006/7 and 2007/8 saw snowfall in Sussex - in the latter case falling as late as April. We haven't managed a white Christmas since 1970, but there was lying snow on 25th December 2010 - the first time in over twenty years.
Now this is only my anecdotal evidence, but being something of a weather anorak, I am pretty sure my memory is not deceiving me. However, proponents of global warming are still bearting their drum as loudly as ever. 2012, we are told, was one of the ten warmest years ever. Not in Gloucestershire it wasn't! Apart from late May and early September, I seem to have spent most of the year feeling cold.
Of course, say the "experts", global warming doesn't mean everywhere getting hotter all the time. Yes, fine, but these days if we get more rain, less rain, colder temperatures, warmer temperatures it's always global warming that's allegedly the culprit. One cannot but become rather cynical. I can't speak for Sussex in 2013, as I don't live there now, but I do have in my possession the Sussex Weather Book. by Bob Ogley, Ian Currie and Mark Davison, which reviews the county's weather since 1066, and it seems like there's nothing new under the sun - a September heatwave in 1906 which touched over 30 degrees centigrade, barely 11 inches of rain at Icklesham in 1921, a frost-free December in 1934 and no one bellyaching about global waming in those days. What would today's climate doomsters have made of the great storms of 1250 and 1287, which completely obliterated the island town of Winchelsea, neccessitating its complete rebuilding on its present site?
By the time of these two great storms, it had been over 200 years since King Canute (or Knut) proved to his fawning courtiers, possibly also in Sussex, on the beach at Bosham, that political power does not extend to control of the elements. Why in this supposedly more enlightened age anyone can believe that surrendering further power to our present politicians will solve our weather problems is beyond me.