#cop21 some thoughts

pfrankli ♦ December 2, 2015 ♦ Leave a comment

To the #cop21 delegates in Paris, may I offer some anecdotal evidence.
Having lived in warm climates (Singapore/Spain) for many years, I was rather dreading the cold winters when returning to Netherlands in summer 2013. My memories of frosty mornings, scrapping ice of the car, black ice etc. were still strong in my mind from many winters spent in UK from childhood.
But this is my third winter back in N. Europe and I’ve been counting the number of frosty nights. OK it’s only 2nd of December, and I might yet regret saying this, but so far this winter the score is one! Last winter it was maybe five, and 2013/14 no more than two! Lots of rain, gale force winds and dangerously high tides have been much more prevalent.
The Dutch complain that their favourite winter pastime of skating on frozen canals just doesn’t happen any more, and have resorted to doing the famous ’11 cities’ through the waterways of Friesland on stand up paddle boards in the summer. (It used to be done on ice skates in the winter!)
Whilst I am not particularly unhappy with mild winters, I do genuinely worry about where this is all leading to for my grandchildren. And quite apart from that, even if you don’t believe that climate change is man made….where is the sense in spending billions of dollars taking oil and gas from the earth’s core, transporting it, refining it, and pouring millions of tons of the waste product from it into our atmosphere!
We should ask ourselves are these really sensible actions for a supposedly intelligent race? And then we should look at the sun and the moon, that have been there for us since we were formed, and realise that they give us warmth, light and daily tidal movement with total reliability. So why shouldn’t they provide us with clean energy forever into the future?
#cop21…Go figure!