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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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1:40pm on Sunday, 23rd March, 2008:

I'm Dreaming of a

Weird

White Easter:



This isn't something we tend to get in this part of the world. When I was a kid, it used to snow more often, but usually in January and February, occasionally December, but never March. There might have been the odd hailstorm in summer, but no proper snow. Today, we got proper snow.

When my mother was born, at the end of February, there was a heavy snowfall. People didn't used to believe her when she told them, because the snow was usually all finished by then. Yet here we are, officially in Spring, and there's a couple of inches of white stuff layering the ground.

I expect this cold snap will be interpreted by concerned members of the public as yet more evidence of global warming (even though it's, well, not warm), but whether it actually is or not is another matter. Climate change, while not working to geological time, is nevertheless not something you should see growing evidence of over the course of the mere 5 years that have elapsed since you heard of it. I think the planet is indeed warming up, and that we're going to see weather patterns increasingly dissimilar to what we're used to, but the assumption that every freaky piece of weather is automatically due to burning too much fossil fuel is an unwise one to make. The reason it's unwise is because if we see a few years without weird occurrences such as snow on Easter Sunday, people may believe that the prophets of doom were wrong and the danger has been averted. It hasn't, it's just happening slowly. Unusual snowfalls are noise, not the underlying trend. I was taught about the greenhouse effect in the 1970s, so know that people must have been monitoring the situation since before then; it's just not as happening-right-bef0re-your-eyes as TV news shows would like.

So, to cheer you up after that gloomy forecast, here's a cute snow reindeer my younger daughter made:


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Copyright © 2008 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).