It's a Bank Holiday here in the U.K. but it's not raining. Indeed it has barely rained for ages. This is unusual, doubly so for April. Few people are complaining, though, and the BBC is forecasting light rain come the Royal Wedding on Friday, so the earth is not about to spin off its axis just yet. Nevertheless, every time we have "unseasonably" hot/wet/cold/dry weather these days, dark mutterings about climate change will follow briskly behind.
I'm no meteorologist (although that is one of those many careers that I wish had occurred to me as possible before it became unattainable), but I know there is a difference between weather and climate. So because it doesn't rain for a bit, or snows like dandruff for weeks, we haven't experienced a change in climate until that has become a repeated trend or even the predicted norm. Still, there are wiser heads than mine that have been convinced that climate change is occurring. Hands are duly wrung and gloomy forebodings are rife, but when it comes to doing anything about it we do seem a bit slow on the uptake.
There are quite a few wind-farms dotted about the place and I saw an experimental wave-powered generator bobbing up and down a couple of years ago, but they represent a tiny proportion of the energy even this little country needs to remain prosperous. There are reasons for this, not least of them being money, but also at work is a natural human tendency to sort out a crisis when it arises rather than prevent it. A notable example of this has been the nuclear crisis in Japan that followed the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami a few weeks ago. 20/20 hindsight is barely necessary to make the wisdom of building multiple reactors on a fault line questionable. But there they were, and are in California for that matter. Of course the earthquake was worse than anyone could remember, but geologists seemed pretty confident that it was going to happen sooner or later. Happened to be sooner. Woops.
Climate change has a similar feel to it. It's like that homework you put off until it became an essay crisis. The rattle you didn't get fixed until the car broke down. Unlike the essay or the car, though, the climate may not be something we can sort out once the crisis point is reached. It's being so cheerful that keeps me going...
