I hate the cold. It HURTS. I love heat. The hotter the better. My ideal climate is somewhere like the Sahara desert. Boiling. I want to crack an egg on the pavement and watch it fry. I want all windows open all day and all night with a giant fan whooshing from the ceiling. I want sweat to be pouring off me in cataracts. I want to be able to remove the six layers of clothing I wear most of the year to fend off a hypothermic coma. I want to be able to switch off the central heating so the gas bill doesn’t bankrupt us. I want it to be so hot the Bay evaporates and Carwyn Jones spontaneously combusts. Preferably while he’s standing at his First Minister’s rostrum giving the UK government his usual hard-hitting message: “You are being so horrible to Wales – do continue.”
Cardiff is on the same latitude (51°N) as freezing Newfoundland and Kamchatka. We only have a reasonably temperate climate thanks to the Gulf Stream and the Jet Stream bringing comparatively warm currents of water and air from the west. Without those benign influences Cardiff would have the average temperatures of Ottawa and would thus, for me at least, be uninhabitable. This diabolical, never-ending Winter, coming after last year’s non-existent Summer, is testing my Cardiff credentials to breaking point.
Every morning when I wake I look out of the window at the chimneys of the Celsa Works to see which way the CO2’s blowing. Day after day, month after month, the air flow is from the east, the north or, worst of all, the dreaded north-east – meaning the plume drifts off towards Devon. I need it to be coming my way, because that would mean the air is coming from the south or the west. Sod the particulates; I’d happily take lungfuls of ’em just to feel warm. Oh for the balmy zephyrs, sweet breath and sensuous massage of a gigantic high pressure system over the Azores!
Man-made climate change is a scientific fact, disputed only by the petrochemical industry, Nigel Lawson, Sarah Palin and my father. Australia burns, America parches, Asia floods, Africa starves, Pacific islands drown, ice-caps dissolve, glaciers retreat, storms get more extreme…and world governments do nothing. Wales, without a voice in global affairs, is a powerless onlooker. And, typical of Welsh luck, we won’t even get the short-term bonus of higher temperatures. The Atlantic currents are switching off and our prevailing weather increasingly comes from Siberia. Here it will be global cooling. Much more of this and I’m off to Timbuktu – if Mali will have me.
I agree this “climate change” is dreadful.
Bring back good old 20th century global warming when it was “scientific fact” that our summers were to get warmer and warmer, drought would become an annual event (remember when we were all implored to buy water butts to save rainwater), spring would arrive earlier each year (again remember the plethora of photos in newspapers of January daffodils in bloom as proof that “global warming” was happening), we would all be sunning ourselves on beaches in November and lying snow was never to be seen again in lowland UK.
So what ever happened to that hole in the ozone layer?
The ozone hole’s still there – but smaller because the CFCs that caused it were banned world-wide. Summers are getting warmer and warmer, drought is an annual event, spring does arrive earlier – but not necessarily on these islands. It’s “global warming” Glen, not “British warming”.
we’re at present in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the weather here is out of sorts too. Summer 11/12 was so bad the apple harvest was low (as in the British Isles) then Winter 12 ended with low rainfall, and Summer 12/13 has been the hottest and dryest for 35 years.
The whole of the North Island is officially in drought and the South isn’t far behind. The Marlborough wine growing region’s river water flows are nearing the flow point where irrigation stops.
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