Saturday 11th February

You shouldn’t always wish for things so hard, or so it seems to me.  I had been the first to bemoan there not being a real winter just a few weeks ago.  There I was, so confidently predicting that we would escape completely the ravages of Winter, we had had such a warm November and mild December, and January had crept in and out again with hardly a murmur that I had almost forgotten about February, often the most vicious of months.  Well I have truly had my comeuppance, as Grandma would say; Winter has us in its grip. But in fact we are having an easy time of it; most of Europe is having a harder time of it than we are.  There are reports of people freezing to death in Hungary and the Ukraine, and in the Czech Republic they have temperatures of nearly minus 40.  And we begin to ask ourselves if Global Warming has anything to do with it, three cold winters in a row may not be a record, but it might be a sign that the climate is subtly changing.  Along with the ever warmer summers we seem to hear reported each Autumn we are getting much colder snaps in the Winter.  Climate change has been knocked off the agenda of late, but possibly it is the greatest problem mankind has ever faced.  There are those doom-sayers who even predict that we are rapidly approaching a tipping point, where no matter how much we reduce our carbon emissions we have had it, the earth will simply not be able to cope, and will enter some sort of drastic end- phase.  Trouble is they cannot quite make up their minds whether we are going to boil or freeze to death.  I suspect that the truth is that we will blindly carry on with gradually increasing weather problems until someone comes up with a replacement for oil and gas that really works, and that slowly we will pull back from the brink.  I heard a brilliant quote on Newsnight recently by a believer in new technology who predicted that the age of oil was almost over.  When Jeremy Paxman asked what would incentivise people to give up oil and move to a new energy source when there was still so much oil about.  The man whose name escapes me, said, “Listen, the stone age did not end because of a shortage of stone.”  Meaning that it ended because a better technology, metal, came along