Britain is currently experiencing an unusually extended winter, with an icy Siberian blast bringing record snow falls to many areas, and temperatures hovering around freezing over most of the country.\u00a0 It’s a marked contrast to last year, when we were basking in warm spring weather.\u00a0 Nobody minds a bit of seasonal cold weather, but it’s three months since Christmas, and we’re all getting a bit fed up with cold and gloomy.\u00a0 I suspect the whole nation is suffering a collective deficiency of vitamin D as the sun has been in very short supply.\u00a0 Next week\u00a0I will be sending in my three-month solar panel readings, and\u00a0I\u00a0can confidentally predict it will be the lowest quarterly yield of power since the system\u00a0was installed 2 years ago.<\/p>\n
We can’t definitively link one weather event to wider changes in the climate, but comments made today\u00a0by Professor Sir John Beddington are a stark reminder of the impacts that climate change will have.\u00a0\u00a0Prof. Beddington\u00a0retires next week from the post of chief scientific adviser to the UK government.\u00a0 In a wide ranging interview with the BBC he stated that there is a “need for urgency” in tackling climate change.\u00a0 He said that the later governments left it, the harder it would be to combat:<\/p>\n
“The [current] variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average. That suggests that we are going to have more droughts, we are going to have more floods, we are going to have more sea surges and we are going to have more storms.<\/p>\n
“These are the sort of changes that are going to affect us in quite a short timescale,” he warned.\u00a0 He also bluntly dismissed the claims of climate sceptics that\u00a0increasing CO2 levels were not responsible for rising global temperatures:\u00a0 “The evidence that climate change is happening is completely unequivocal, but the\u00a0issue has been clouded by the fact that the planet’s climate system operates slowly to changes and so there are long delays in CO2 level rises in the atmosphere resulting in changes to weather patterns.\u00a0 So the (weather for the) next 20 or 30 years are going to be determined by what’s up there now.”<\/p>\n
Authoritative voices such as Prof. Beddington’s need to be listened to.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the minority view of climate scpetics seem to get as much, if not more coverage.\u00a0 Yes, it’s a complex issue, rarely fully understood by the lay person, but to me that doesn’t mean we should just sit on our hands until every last sceptic has been converted.\u00a0 In one respect Prof. Beddington is wrong – his comment about Governments needing to make the key decisions.\u00a0 They are part of the solution for sure, but more important are the decisions of hundreds, thousands, hopefully millions of people to reduce our impact on creation.\u00a0 If all of us\u00a0decided to\u00a0fly less, drive less, consume less, insulate our houses better, eat more local produce, and all the other things we can already do <\/em>but somehow choose not to, this problem would be half-way solved.<\/p>\n Andy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Britain is currently experiencing an unusually extended winter, with an icy Siberian blast bringing record snow falls to many areas, and temperatures hovering around freezing over most of the country.\u00a0 It’s a marked contrast to last year, when we were … Continue reading