[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Momentarily chilly in the UK

[Patrick Bond]

Skating on Thin Ice

The freeze got me on my skates, and brought the loonies out of their holes.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 9th January 2009

I have spent the last two evenings skating. Last night we laid lanterns 
out across the ice and swooped and swung and fell flat on our faces on 
this silent lake in mid-Wales, for hours by moonlight. I should have 
been in bed - I have a chest infection and a cold - but I wouldn’t have 
missed it for anything.

For the exhilaration of this primal game was shaded with sadness: all of 
us knew that this time might be our last. It is many winters since most 
of the lakes in England and Wales have frozen hard enough to support a 
skating party; with every year the chances of another one recede. The 
fuss this country has made about the current cold snap reminds us how 
rare such events have become.

My friend John Mason, who has been photographing extreme weather events 
in this valley for three decades, sent me some pictures of the “Great 
Blizzard” that struck 27 years today - on January 9th 1982, with a note 
explaining that my home town, Machynlleth, “was inaccessible by anything 
other than helicopter for over a week”. His photos show cars stuck on 
the roads, surrounded by snowdrifts.

I remember that winter well. I started work at an intensive pig farm 
three days before the freeze began. The feeding system set like concrete 
and for two weeks we had to run two buckets of feed a day to each of the 
1400 pigs. I would get home at seven and fall asleep in the shower. By 
the time the system thawed, we were wading through a sea of pigshit, as 
there had been no time to muck the units out. Some of the sows in the 
farrowing sheds had died of cold and blown up like barrage balloons. As 
the lowest farmhand, I had to climb over them, cut my way into the body 
cavity and burst them, then dig out the remains with a shovel. I’m sure 
there are worse jobs, but they don’t immediately come to mind.

On one night during that winter I was tobogganing with a group of 
friends on a hill outside our village in south Oxfordshire. Dragging my 
sledge back to the top, I saw someone pointing, open-mouthed, at the 
horizon. Great pillars of white light were shimmering up to the zenith 
of the sky, swinging like crazy searchlights then suddenly collapsing. 
Our theories ranged from military testing to alien invasion. Several 
years later I read that the northern lights had been recorded that night 
in southern Oxfordshire for the first time in a century.

The weather of the past few weeks would have been unexceptional in the 
early 1980s. Today it is being cited as definitive proof that manmade 
climate change can’t be happening. There’s a splendid example of such 
blithering idiocy here: 
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner/blog/2009/01/07/global_warming_al_gores_convenient_untruth_freezes_over. 
Gerald Warner, writing in the Telegraph, contends that the cold snap 
lends more support to the idea of a new ice age than to global warming 
theory. Were he to apply this reasoning consistently, he would have to 
write another blog on Sunday showing that, due to the unseasonably warm 
temperatures the Met Office forecasts for the UK this weekend, global 
warming is definitely happening. And the following week, if there’s 
another cold snap, he should predict a new ice age again.

Faced with a choice between global temperature records covering more 
than a century, or three weeks of cooling in one small corner of the 
planet, Mr Warner chooses the second dataset to identify long-running 
global trends. Though he has evidently never read or never understood a 
peer-reviewed paper on this subject in his entire crabbed life, he then 
goes on to dismiss this whole canon of science as nonsense. Is there any 
other subject on which journalists can make such magnificent idiots of 
themselves and still keep their jobs?

When heatwaves strike, climate scientists and environmentalists tend 
towards caution, explaining that though such events may be consistent 
with predictions they cannot be used as proof that climate change is 
taking place: only the long-running global trend is a reliable guide. If 
anyone is foolish enough to present a heatwave as clear evidence of 
manmade climate change, the deniers jump all over them. The same critics 
then use every snow flurry or frozen puddle as evidence of the collapse 
of global warming theory.

The thought that I might never skate outdoors again feels like a 
bereavement. I pray for another cold snap, even though I know it will 
bring all the nincompoops in Britain out of their holes, yapping about a 
new ice age.

www.monbiot.com