Records tumbling day by day

One night last week in central Scotland the night-time temperature never dropped below 14 degrees, making it the warmest February night since accurate records began in 1659. Yesterday in Wales the temperature nudged above 19 degrees - the warmest February day in Britain’s recorded history. Last Friday the temperature in Cardiff was no less than 8 degrees higher than in Athens: I know this because my wife was attending a conference in Athens at the time. With conditions in February continuing to resemble more an Indian summer than late winter, we may expect more records to fall in the next few days.

In central Cardiff this morning, where I live, the city awoke to a harsh frost. By ten o’clock it had vanished without trace and the air was mild. By lunchtime it was positively warm, with not a cloud in the sky and not even a zephyr of breeze. It could have been July. As I read my book sitting in the garden at one o’clock, the temperature was 20 degree in the shade, so yesterday’s record has already gone west.

Before long the famous January record for highest temperature may go. An incredible 18.6 degrees was recorded, again in Scotland, back in the 1970s. And it can’t be long before the all time high temperature will reach 40 degrees - it’s already close, at 39.2 (100 degrees Fahrenheit) which was recorded in Gravesend in 2003.

Yet despite all this, confounding the views of ill informed climate change deniers such as Donald Trump, temperatures can also dip alarmingly. America has just endured an almost unprecedented cold snap which saw frost and snow in the deep south, and metres of snowfall further north. In parts of North America near the heart of the continent, conditions were as close to the Antarctic as anywhere else. In Europe, of course, we had our “beast from the East” almost exactly a year ago, with Central Europe getting it even worse than we did - and watch out, because there’s still time for it to happen again this year.

This doesn’t contradict the theory of climate change; on the contrary it reinforces it. Climate change models predict increasing highs and lows, as well as more extreme weather events generally; tornados, hurricanes, flooding events that were formally 1 in 500 year events becoming almost the norm - and all this is happening, right now, all over the world.

Just because you get a cold snap, Donald, doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. Try to get that into your thick skull.

No one is illegal

However unpleasant they may be. Britain has said it doesn’t  want to take IS bride Shameema Begum back; so has the Netherlands and Bangladesh, her only other two options. So she languishes in a refugee camp in northern Syria, essentially a stateless person - a situation no human being should be faced with.

Ms Begum has done herself few favours. She comes over as emotionally flat, if not withdrawn, refuses to trash the death cult she bound herself to, and even approved of the Manchester bombing in 2017. But we must remember that 2 of her babies have died. I have lost one child, and know how devastating that is. Losing two must be even worse. Now she faces even more stress, the like of which few of us ever have to deal with. She has a new baby, who I would imagine is also in danger, considering the hideously unsanitary conditions that exist inside every refugee camp.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like Ms Begum. She holds views, whether as a result of “grooming”, brainwashing” or whatever, which I find utterly repellant. I have made my feelings on the muderous barbarians of IS plain in the past. But this woman is British, whether we like it or not, and she should be allowed to return to her home and bring her baby with her. If she has committed any crimes, she should be dealt with accordingly, but it is here she belongs - unfortunately. There are a lot of extremely unpleasant people in this country. But we can’t just wash our hands of them when they leave our shores.

Who’s gaining an unfair advantage?

Certain powerful factions within the athletics community think Caster Semenya has an unfair advantage. She is unquestionably a woman; no one is arguing with that, but she has much higher than normal levels of testosterone circulating in her bloodstream, which has resulted in her developing a body shape more like that of a man than a woman. So at that level she does have an advantage over women with more normal testosterone levels, but if she does, it is only an advantage nature has given her.

Did Usain Bolt have an unfair advantage over the men he competed against, owing to his very long legs, the abundance of fast-twitch fibres in his muscles and his steely determination to win? No, theses were the gifts God gave him and my goodness didn’t he exploit them to their fullest. Do those lanky beanpoles of athletes who seem to be suited to jumping high have an unfair advantage over more normally proportioned athletes? Come to that, what about all those incredibly tall basketball players who have benefited from a natural excess of Human Growth Hormone? Step aside Shaquille O’Neill, you 7 foot tall freak- the IAAF reckons you’re cheating.

Pelagius says: leave Semenya alone! She can’t help the way her body is made, and who can blame her for making the most of her astonishing gifts. Remember, she didn’t get to the top of her game solely on her hormonal status. She has trained long and hard, as any athlete must who wishes to excell at the highest level. And while it might be annoying for the IAAF idiots to see her looking more like a man than a woman, Pelagius still says: get over yourselves.

The Kids are alright

Today thousands of school kids downed pens and turned out for the planet. Despite the fact that today’s youth often come over as self-interested bums who are either about getting high or getting rich, todays demo in London was a ray of sunshine on a day marked by gloom over Brexit and Trump’s lack of interest in climate change, or indeed anything that doesn’t strike a chord with his ignorant, bigoted base.

These kids know it will be them, and not the old gits like me who currently run the world who are going to be directly affected by climate change, and they don’t like what lies ahead for them. I don’t blame them. Get out there guys- no one else is going to do it for you!

Farewell insects, you were kind of fun

Sometimes insects can be a damn nuisance. If you’ve ever been assailed by a cloud of midges, annoyed by flies, or stung by a wasp, you might agree. Insects in the shape of the Anopheles mosquito have been responsible for the spreading of malaria, one of the biggest scourges of mankind in history.

I remember once, having been stung by a wasp, I commented to a friend that it wouldn’t be such a bad things if wasps, and a few other selected insect species, vanished from the face of the earth. But he responded that wasps are actually an essential part of the food chain, preying on smaller creatures and themselves providing a food source for larger ones. That’s the way it is in nature. Which is why the news that insect populations are due to take a nose dive in the next few decades is worrying indeed. For we are part of the food chain - in fact we’re at the top of it. But for us to thrive, creatures further down the chain need to thrive too, and if part of that chain is disrupted, everything suffers.

I was reading the other day about the clearances in the Scottish highlands in the early 19th century. Thousands of men, women and children were evicted from their homes and villages by Scottish lairds anxious to increase the profitability of their land by raising Cheviot sheep, and encouraging deer for hunting purposes. Today we see these acts as monstrous, and rightly so. But today, landowners are are acting with a similar disregard of almost anything unrelated to profit; hence they farm their land as intensively as possible, encouraging monoclonal blocks of plants, protected by insecticides that discourage any incursion of their cash-crops. If you’ve ever seen a vast area of countryside glowing a golden yellow with the flowers of oil seed rape, you’ll know what I mean. But farmers who use. Their land in this way threaten the entire ecosystem, which of course includes us humans too.
And if you think things have come to a sorry pass in this country, spare a thought for south-easr Asia, and especially Indonesia, where as I write this, vast swathes of virgin rainforest are being replaced by the monoculture of palm oil plantations, threatening the existence of, not only insects but rare and precious animals such as the orangutan and other beasts whose DNA is so closely related to our own they should be considered as first cousins to the human race.

It isn’t just climate change that threatens us human beings, and the animal and plant kingdoms. The pell-mell pace of agricultural methods that take no account of natural diversity is just as bad. Possibly worse. I’m 68 now; at best I’ve got a couple of decades left. But the young folk, your children and grandchildren, they’ll have to live in the brave and terrible worlds we have created for them. I wish them luck. They’ll need it.