Weather Patterns: Out of season
Standing at the threshold of 2011, it is pertinent to point out that our way of living has to change.
Vision is reversed: The sky is a shifting mosaic of waves trailing phosphorescent scrolls of seaweed and the land, heavily disguised in opaque mist, rolls onwards and away in to infinity. It is bitterly cold. Each morning now the water lily ponds are solid ice and the sun — myopically weak as the year comes to a close — hardly manages to turn them to slush before temperatures plummet and they solidify again.
Weather patterns have definitely changed over the 15 years I have personally been monitoring them at my eyrie. Winters are colder, drier and, dare I say it, shorter — although, naturally, having said that, this winter will immediately turn into a real cracker in more ways than one! In the garden, the plants are performing out of season magic: There was a smattering of delicate apple blossom in October when the days were indeed spring-like, violets have been blooming profusely since early November, and the naturalized freesias shot up a full six inches before deciding they’d got it wrong and flopped over in brittle surrender. Yet there is absolutely no sign of flower buds on the hellebores which are usually smothered in delicate shades of pink at this time of the year.
Although temperatures fluctuate wildly from the ‘norm’ all year round, making it difficult to plan garden-wise and even wardrobe-wise as compared to 10 years back, up to a point, there had been an established climatic pattern. Snow arrived during the last week of December and stayed on until early March; spring brought thunderstorms with hail; summers were warm and wet; autumns long and dry with storms breaking the monotony every two or three weeks but now….there is no saying, no imagining what will happen or when.
Climate change skeptics would do well to spend time in a place as exposed to the weather as this: I live with it day and night and have become — as do all those existing hand in glove with the natural world — synchronized to its myriad rhythms. City dwellers rarely, if ever, live in tune with nature; mountain and rural-dwellers must if they are to survive which is where the big, bad ogre of climate change marches in to the picture frame to pound sowing, harvesting, even living patterns unrepentantly in to the suddenly uncooperative earth.
‘Normal’ weather patterns — perhaps shifting over a 20, 50, 80 or 100 year cycle — are an accepted part of natural survival which all living things, humans included, adapt to as a matter of course but what is happening right now, and has been for some time, is that everything is speeded up. Every conceivable climatic related ingredient has been tossed in to a boiling, roiling cauldron being stirred by an entire coven of witches. It is almost impossible to look at the news now without there being a massive climate event in there somewhere. Over the past few weeks, the Middle East was torn apart by snowstorms, sandstorms and gale force winds, Australia suffered both fire and floods, Armenia had floods, South America had floods and mud slides, Europe suffered unprecedented early snowfall and record breaking low temperatures. The list goes right on through to an increase in volcanic action which may, or may not, be linked to man’s cataclysmic torture of planet earth.
Standing at the threshold of 2011, it is pertinent to point out that our way of living has to change. And no, this is not yet another doomsday scenario but an honest observation of how things really are. Take the continuing climate change conferences, held at exorbitant expense at ‘special’ venues around the globe, to which hundreds of people travel by air whilst knowing full well that aeroplanes are one of the largest atmospheric atmospheric polluters in existence. Then there is the over all cost of pointless junkets: Hotel accommodation and everything that goes with it, travel expenses, side trips to view this, that and the other, phone calls, billions of hours of preparation eating up some pretty large forests in the form of papers written, papers presented, papers discarded etc. Climate change conferences, instead of lifting pressure off the planet, are now part of the problem. If participants were really serious about halting the trend, they could simply sit in their offices and hold discussions live on the internet. These complicated debates are not the answer and I wonder exactly who those behind them are trying to fool: us the people or themselves the hedonists? Perhaps if they practiced what they preach they could be taken seriously but, they don’t!
Change, when and if it comes, can only be brought about by the billions of ordinary worker ants populating the globe yet, even if we have a wish to alter the way we do things, businesses, multinationals being the largest criminal factor here, put every conceivable pressure on us to remain bogged in the consumerist society they have created. There are gadgets for almost everything, gadgets that consume unnecessary power, need fixing or replacing with updated versions; we are encouraged to eat and drink rubbish which is packaged in what will ultimately be more rubbish to poison the earth and which devours precious resources, encouraged to live beyond and consume way past the tipping point for planetary survival and all in the name of someone else’s profit!
When you think about it, we are nothing more than ridiculously stupid lemmings who have long forgotten how to stand up for themselves and say ‘No’!
Human beings are, it is claimed, social animals who are most comfortable operating in packs but, and I leave you with this point to ponder, isn’t there anyone out there who is brave enough to stand up and be counted, to step out of the box and say ‘No more’?
Published in The Express Tribune, December 26th, 2010.