There Is None So Blind As Those That Refuse To See...

In July ‘07 I accessed the Reuters news reports to see what was happening to the world’s weather. In Romania, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, temperatures had reached around 44 degrees Centigrade, approximately 113 degrees Fahrenheit. In Romania 30 people were reported to have died due to the heat and deaths had also been reported in the other affected areas. In Bari, Italy thousands of people were reported trapped on beaches by a fire that killed several and in Serbia 10,000 chickens died from the heat in battery farms.

Meanwhile Sudan was experiencing its worst floods in living memory. Heavy rains had already killed 55, destroyed 25,000 homes, and those living near flood plains and rivers were been warned to relocate to higher ground. In China severe flooding affected around half the country, with 800 deaths being attributed to this. Nearly 800 deaths had been attributed to the monsoon floods in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and while all this was going on Tibet was reported as warming up faster than anywhere else on Earth. As the Tibetan glaciers disappeared, and some of China’s major rivers that are fed by them dried, yet another environmental disaster loomed. In the UK we had flooding in the Midlands where some areas experienced a months rain in less than a day for several days, and so it went on.

As I write this, November 2007, flooding has devastated Mexico, and in Africa scientists have predicted that due to Global Warming (Climate Chaos) 30% of the coastal regions would be in peril in the years to come and that many parts of the continent would be uncultivable or uninhabitable. Meanwhile in the UK the cold weather that would have killed off the Bluetongue carrying midges that have devastated many in the sheep farming community has yet to arrive, roses are still blooming as are many of the other plants in our garden and the new grass growth (the UK in November?) is too rich for our friend to put his horse out to meadow.

Meanwhile two students from Gothenburg published a spoof on-line report claiming to be from ‘The Journal of Geoclimatic Studies’ in Japan that stated that bacteria in the Pacific and Atlantic emitted 300 times more C02 than industry. Climate denying scientists jumped on the report and it was circulated and publicised worldwide until someone spotted that it was a hoax!

Isn’t it strange that supposedly intelligent people are as ready to accept the false as they are to ignore the obvious?