Whatever happened to global warming?
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Severe winter storms and cold snaps in the US, with temps then going up again well above winter temps, and frost even in southern California and New Mexico, threatening, in southern CA the citrus crop.
Rain, rain, and still more rain, for most of last year, followed by snow, in the UK and also the coldest winter – on record, almost – predicted for Syria with temps of -10C.
So, what exactly happened to the global warming that they were talking about – and still do – that was going to end all snowy and cold winters in (southern) Britain and which would the UK, especially the south, to have a climate much like southern Italy?
Britain was going to be, so it was said, the next wine growing region of Europe but, I guess, we will just have to wait and see, don't we.
The world's climate is changing, that much appears to be the case, but in which way and direction is still a question and while a great percentage of it is due with man's activity and pollution – please not I say pollution and not CO2 emissions as they are not the be all and end all here – some of it is also due to other causes. But we must not talk about those things. The Church of Global Warming will not permit it.
The world's climate is, definitely, in a total mess and in an upheaval and this is also evident by the recent very hot spell in Australian with devastating wild fires followed storms with tons of rain. OK, that put out the fires but also caused serious flooding everywhere where it hit.
In North America during the winter of 2012/2013 for about two weeks a cold area was moving down and then up and then down the country again, and it is this cold front that caused the serious frosts even as far south as southern California.
2012 and the beginning of 2013 certainly have shown that the climate all around the world is going, more or less, haywire.
The wettest drought in history, as the spin doctors of the British government called it (don't ask me how you can have a wet drought, but hey, I am no spin doctor) has caused serious and severe crop failures and farmers are still not even in a position to drill in the next season's seeds into their fields as they are so water logged that they cannot even get onto them.
The same goes for woods and forests and it is hard to do work in those environments in the first months of 2013 also. Everything is just a bog wherever one goes.
Farmers and growers were told, only a year or two ago, that they would to adapt to global warming and to very dry summers and thus should be looking to plant and sow drought-resistant varieties and foods that have, until now, been grown in the warmer areas of Europe and such. Now it would appear that farmers and growers may have to find some water-resistant crops instead.
The wet weather of the so-called summer of 2012 had the potato blight run rampant and the blame was given to people growing food at home in their gardens or in allotment. That some of the blight-resistant varieties of potatoes were the first to succumb no one wants to know. It was not so much the blight escaping from home gardens and allotments to the farmers' fields but the other way round.
In the beginning of February 2013 the umpteenth violent blizzard, this one called Nemo, hit the United States, and dumped many feet of snow on New York, Boston and other places on the East Coast. And in Britain, while no real extreme winter weather materialized as in the last couple of years, at least not at the time of writing, the fact that everything is waterlogged is causing problems.
Glacial melting, once directly blamed on rising temperatures the world over and thus global warming has now been found to be caused by what they call black carbon which, in fact, is nothing more that soot from our industries. But the word carbon sounds so much better since we have now developed a way of trading in carbon credits, those modern indulgences.
The climate around the globe is throwing a wobbly and, methinks, Mother Earth is trying to tell us something and that something is that we need to change our ways and live with Nature and not fight Nature. Man is a part of Nature and cannot be apart of Nature.
© 2013
