Another typical day but devoted to web logging. Three were posted…equalling my record. A slight aberration at the end of the day when I went across to The Ship to have a pint of Guinness with Tony Payne…and enjoy an intelligent conversation about life the universe and women. Back at the boat I finished Wycliffe and The Last Rites by W.J.Burley…and went to sleep happy after getting through a bottle of Valencia…£ 3.29 for eleven and a half percent.
The weather is back to normal after eight unusually mild winters. The 30-year average for March is 4.7°C. This year it is presently running at 2.4°C. The 8-year average from 1998 to 2005 was 6.1°C. So it is cold…but not unreasonably so…even though the English countryside seems frozen at the moment.
Along the lanes the glossy yellow stars of lesser celandines should be sparkling in the ditches holding their faces up to the sun but there is no sign of them. In the hedges one would have expected to see the first delicate white flowers of cherry plum with a sprinkling of green leaves on the twigs around them. But with the exception of a cherry tree by the side of the main Rye to Winchelsea road in the grounds of a private house next to the River Haven Hotel there is no sign of cherry blossom. As for the pure white blackthorn flowers the first of those should be out by the end of March but there seems little hope of that. A few sweet violets with their subtle fragrance were out before the recent cold spell struck but they have faded away.
Apparently primroses came out last month in Devon and Cornwall but I saw no sign of them in Wales despite unseasonably warm weather throughout my two and a half month stay. Nor is there any sign of them even now here in the Garden Of England. Normally I would have expected them to be out several weeks ago...on the shortcut across The Ridge to Conquest Hospital and St Leonard’s. In milder springs the first white pink-tinged blossoms of the wood anemone would have been out too. Their fern-like leaves have already pushed up through the woodland floor but like the first shoots of bluebells dotted around them they have stopped growing.
Warmer days and downfalls of rain are expected next weekend and if they come the flowers and trees will quickly respond. In a fortnight we may already have forgotten that we had a chilly start to the spring this year…and the papers will be launching yet more stories about global warming. Global warming is the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the greenhouse effect.
Imagine the composition of the earth’s atmosphere as a 100 yard football field. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen so starting from the goal line this will get you to the seventy-eight yard line. Nearly all of what is left is oxygen which takes you to the ninety-nine yard line. Most of what remains after that is the inert gas argon which brings you to within three and a half inches of the goal line. That’s pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. How much of the remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred yard football field. And do you know how much it has increased on our football field in the last 50 years? Three eighths of an inch…less than the thickness of a pencil.
Carbon dioxide is used by plants to photosynthesise. The plants take in the gas via small openings on the surface of their leaves called stomata that can open and close in response to atmospheric conditions and the plant needs. When the stomata are open some water is lost in a process called plant transpiration…plants sweat. Laboratory experiments have shown plants become more efficient in the presence of greater levels of carbon dioxide so the stomata do not open as often or for as long. More carbon dioxide means less transpiration which means more water stays in the soil.
It seems to be a well-known fact that the flow of many rivers around the world is increasing even though rainfall has changed very little in the last few decades. Aha…you have got there before me. Scientists and propagandists for global warming have their pseudo-scientific link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising sea levels. More water in the soil means more runs off into rivers which explains the increase in river flow and must lead in the fullness of time…and with the right parameters in the computer models…to the inundation of low-lying cities like New Orleans within all our lifetimes.
But sea levels are not rising…the last time I looked at the data a year or so ago there was no discernible shift over the past few decades. Of course sea levels move around. There was a disaster in Queensland over the weekend with sea levels changing by up to twelve feet for instance. And have you heard of tides? My sea level goes up and down like a yo-yo twice a day and the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean swirl around like water in a cooking basin. And do you remember in the days before the invention of global warning all the concern about the increasing run-off all over the world as hills were stripped of their trees and intensive agriculture decimated the natural vegetation cover. Increased run-off? Of course. But caused by plants getting fitter and sweating less in their extra fraction of an inch of carbon dioxide. Pull the other one. What complete and utter baloney.
