FraserWords

Come on then. With the rain lashing us like we’re living in the end days so the helpless, sodden Earth bleeds muddy tears, let’s get it over with: Climate change.

The argument boils down to this: are we, mankind, forcing Earth’s climate to change because of our voracious ways? Or is the Earth just going through one of its periodic periods of change, through which we are unlucky enough to live?

It seems to me that almost everybody agrees the climate is changing – we just can’t agree on why. Those who say man has not caused climate change, and there’s nothing we can do, seem to accept that there is, how shall we put it, difference… polar bears have less ice to perch on and that’s the way the earth is. We’re not able to change a thing as massive as a planet. Be Zen. Accept it. The world will survive. Some of humanity may not but hey, who’s going to weep over a few lost Goves, eh?

Well, I have sympathy with that argument. But I think it’s not the important argument, anyway.

Isn’t the most important point that the climate is changing – and may cause massive problems for ourselves and our descendants, no matter whose fault it is? Can anybody disagree with the point that change is happening, it’s always happening? By the very definition of the case of those against the argument that man has caused the change, it has to happen. Earth’s patterns change. That’s what they do.

So if cars and factories and pollution and emissions and effluent are not to blame for climate change, well, that doesn’t suddenly make them good things, does it?

Is it so bad to be supporting an argument that says we should produce less harmful things – because even if pollutants don’t harm the global environment, even if pollutants don’t cause global warming, they do make people and animals ill. Power stations are ugly. Cars are ugly. Chopping down forests hurts animals and plants, building on fields makes our environment less attractive, discharging stuff in rivers kills fish.

Surely, doing things in a way that consumes less of our resources and pumps out less poison actually makes life more pleasant for us all, global warming or no.

Even if policing factories and cutting emissions and cutting down aeroplane flights and behaving sustainably won’t save the planet, we should do it. Because it will make life better. Create more jobs. Make us live with an eye on whether we’re turning the grass red.

But most of all, of course, we should live as if we believe man has caused global warming because it puts us on the opposite side of the argument to George W Bush and his fat-arsed greedy American mogul friends who want to dig up the virgin Arctic for oil and kill a few more billion seabirds. That, my friends, is the side of the argument on which we should all strive to be.

Lane rage

Well, once we had a lane going down the hill outside the house but now it is a river. On the rare occasions when it stops raining we can see the pitted, scarred shambles where the road used to be. Brother Bertie reports that from the train cab where he used to look out on track, he now sees devastation. Once we had a back drive leading across our field to the lane; now every grain of gravel that used to be its surface is sailing merrily down the Lynher and heading for the English Channel. And that’s all minimal damage.

What a nightmare this last week has been, and you can only feel tremendous sympathy for everybody having to deal with the shocking mess of a flood.

Whatever the arguments about global warming, I know, in my bones, this truth: never, ever in my time have we had so many extreme weather events as we do now. So even if I’m wasting time recycling my miserable few hundred wine bottles every fortnight (well, breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper, as WC Fields probably said), I’m still going to do it in the faint, unproven, hope that we can heal the world, because doing nothing feels very cowardly indeed.

Here isn’t the news

Leveson is about to report. I hope he makes some sort of comment about the standard of actual journalism in this day and age, not just about the phone hacking shenanigans.

For example, BBC and Channel 4 News have been covering the weather, of course. Both have been reporting on flood warnings and villages in danger and roads cut off and railways lines closed. Neither has given us detail. Which rivers? Which roads? Which rail lines? And what’s the weather going to do next? Nope. Wait for the forecast in half an hour’s time.

Shoddy, uninformative journalism; editors have preferred to fill the screen with weather porn footage and pointless live broadcasts from shivering hacks sheltering from the rain.

It’s very common, sadly: they much prefer to cover the news by asking one of their Oxbridge broadcasters what they think about it, rather than telling us what’s been proposed or decided, adding comment from both sides of the debate, and letting us make up our own mind.

Clearly we are very stupid so we must be lectured about each news story as if we don’t really understand what’s going on – but hey, if we what was actually going on was informatively, dispassionately, neutrally reported by, say, oh, a journalist, maybe we wouldn’t be so thick and need so much explanation?

And finally

A snippet of news on the Great Boxing Day Laptop Hunt: it seems that among the prey may very well be a few old mobile phones, the odd stereo, a camera or two  and, in fact, a car. It’s beginning to sound like an episode of Top Gear.

One more thing: you may not know, but we have a champion in our midst: Mrs Hamster is tip-top gold-medal on-the-podium winner-takes-all best-there-is endurance rider of Thea’s Lass. Well done, Mrs H, on a brilliant achievement – see, it’s worth spending 177% of the contents of the Bank of Hamster each week, isn’t it?