Climate Change

 

Certainly UK weather has changed over my lifetime so far. When at Beaumont College as a boy I recall the Thames being frozen solid in Old Windsor. Even upstream in Windsor where the river is wider people were able to walk and even cycle ride  on the ice:

 

 

Today there are reports in The Times that some UK farmers experimenting with rice growing and even with a tea plantation or two. Farming tea or rice in England would not really have been possible in the 1960s.

 

Further afield there are newspaper articles about atrociously cold snow storms hitting large sections of North America with CNN reporting today for example that:

 

• Widespread threat: Two-thirds of the US population is facing down a monster winter storm and extreme cold. The storm’s snow and ice will stretch over 2,000 miles from Texas to New England as it tracks east through the weekend.

• Catastrophic ice storm: Crippling ice accumulations will weigh down and drop power lines and trees in the most serious icing zones in the South. Hundreds of thousands could lose power, some for days. 

Of course global warming affects many other countries very severely. For example in Australia  there was a recent news report of a large number of wild camels which were roaming the outback in search of water. The camels would invade a nearby township raiding the water barrels of some  dwellers and causing many to remain indoors until the camels were seen off.

Camels the humps of which store  fat some of which is transformed into water when required, are usually self sufficient but not this time.