We've had no more snow today but then the existing white stuff is not going anywhere and Marshside Acres still looks like it did in yesterday's picture. I gather this is not the case elsewhere in the UK where frozen precipitation continues unabated.
Of course many of the schools are closed round here in what has become standard practice when a few flakes hit the ground. This is despite the fact that, according to the BBC web-site, there are no road problems anywhere in the county! But it takes more than (or should that be less than?) a lack of transport problems to prevent the determined head teacher giving staff the day off. It's amazing isn't it? Hospitals don't close, the staff at the small business next to us turn up for work, our paper gets delivered by some poor chap who has to battle across miles of frozen tundra to the Marshside Acres gates but as for the schools...there's some snow on the ground, ergo, we close.
So is our winter weather getting worse? It's laughable how many people declaim confidently on this topic, based only on their own hazy memories of a few years. They happily ignore the fact that the earth has been around billions of years and that their sojourn on the planet represents such a tiny fraction of this that no conclusion they can draw is remotely significant. The weather goes through all sorts of cycles and mini ice ages come and go. These things are but blips in the long term experience of the earth's climate.
But blips can have a cause and what do you think is the most likely cause of these blips? Might it have something vaguely to do with Mr Jones down the road sticking some solar panels on his roof (subsidised by me, thanks very much)? Or Mrs Smith in the village who's just bought an electric car? Or even those damned windmills that march across the countryside like something from War of the Worlds (or in our area, stand around in the sea, currently becalmed but still taking a subsidy out of my pocket)? Or maybe it's got something to do with the source of all our energy and life itself. Doesn't this seem more plausible?
The Sun: a very powerful thing which affects your life
There's a physicist called Piers Corbin who has a better record than anyone at predicting the weather and on what does he base his super-spot-on forecasts? Solar activity. As it happens, he reckons that a lack of this is likely to cause some pretty cold winters for some time to come, and no doubt various other weather anomalies. I'm inclined to believe him. I'm all for cutting down on carbon emissions if it saves me some money but that's a world away from the unbelievable arrogance of those King Canute-like people that think the type of car they drive is going to have an effect on the weather. The sun is just so much more powerful than anything that any of us can conceive. It's thanks to the sun that life on earth got going in the first place and it'll be the sun that will determine when life down here finishes. In the meantime, it's pretty obvious that if the sun sneezes, then we'll catch a cold.
Some windmills: not very powerful things which will not affect your life, only your wallet
Who's going to be the first world leader to blink in the extraordinary carbon-control stand-off and admit that all this renewable stuff is a waste of time and money?
For the time being, it's back out into the frosty wasteland to bag a bit of game for dinner. I hope the staff are out of the firing line!
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