Week 8 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘Headless chicken!’

          That is how HRH the Prince of Wales recently described those who deny the reality of global warming or claim that, if global warming is taking place, human activity has anything to do with it. 

            One of the revelations with regard to the weather that has become apparent in recent months has been the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.  If they say rain will reach the East Anglian coast around noon – then it probably will (possibly even reaching drier-than-most Clacton-on-Sea!)  The Met Office has come a long way since the evening when a BBC weatherman confidently assured an enquirer that ‘there will be no hurricane,’ just a few hours before hurricane force winds did strike us!    The severe gale and storm-surge that struck us in early December, uprooting trees, stripping roofs, cutting off electricity – and wrecking the helter-skelter on Clacton pier -  arrived almost exactly on the hour that had been predicted - and so have the many other gales and downpours that have since plagued us  this winter.

 It follows that when the Met Office tells us that the exceptional weather that we have been – and are – experiencing, is probably linked to climate change and that this climate change is most likely the result of human activity, it is time for even the most sceptical (and the most stupid) to pay attention.  The weather definitely has been exceptional!  More than 130 severe flood warnings have been issued in the first six weeks of this year - and that was before the Thames Valley was flooded - compared with only nine in the whole of 2012.   During those same six weeks of 2014 more than 5,000 properties have been flooded (again before the Thames Valley was flooded) and the Environment Agency says that 1.3 million homes have been protected from flooding only by flood defence work carried out during the past decade.

            A Met Office report links ‘the recent extreme weather in Europe and North America to perturbations in the North Atlantic and Pacific jet streams, partly emanating from changing weather patterns in South East Asia and associated with higher than normal ocean temperatures in that region.  The attribution of these changes to global warming caused by human activities requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall.  Such models are now available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investment in flood and coastal defences’.

 At a recent Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, David Cameron said that he suspected that the recent storms battering the UK and the extreme weather in North America were connected to global temperature changes.  However pressure from parliamentary ‘headless chicken’ particularly in his own party made him modify that reply;  ‘You can’t point to one weather event and say that is climate change but many scientists were talking of a link between the two.  The point I was trying to make is whatever you think – even if you think climate-change is mumbo-jumbo – because these things are happening more often, it makes sense to do all you can do to prevent these floods affecting so many people, and that is exactly what we are doing.

In the Barrack Room of the POW ‘camp’ in Germany where I spent the last eighteen months of World War II we had a daily tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for every day.  One or two of those ‘thoughts’ have stuck in my memory to this day.  One was from the German poet Friedrich von Schiller

Mit der Dumheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens (with stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain!)

The Climate Change deniers ‘diabolical cocktail'.

          One member of the government who is prepared to speak his mind about global warming and its effects is Lib.Dem MP Ed Davey, Energy Secretary.  He says that the political consensus about the need to tackle climate change is breaking down as some Conservatives and members of UKIP, driven by ‘a diabolical cocktail of nimbyism, denial of science, and fear of Europe, try to discredit the science by undermining public trust in the scientific evidence for climate change’.

            The chief scientist at the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, declared recently that evidence suggests a link between the extreme weather gripping Britain and climate change. Prime Minister David Cameron has also said that he suspects there is a connection.  However the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has regularly downplayed the risks of climate change, leading to calls from environmental groups and the Green Party for his dismissal.

            Lord Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer says that the link between the floods and global warming is absurd.  He claims that the Met Office denies it and that, ‘It is just this Julia Slingo woman who made this absurd statement. There’s been bad weather before and anyhow, climate change is a global phenomenon and you don’t attribute local things to some global picture’.  If our floods were an isolated incident that argument might have some weight – but other recent meteorological phenomena in the Philippines, Australia, the Indian sub-continent and northern America surely demonstrate that our floods and storms are part of a global phenomenon.  

            Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, also denies any link between the floods and climate change.  On a recent trip to the flooded Somerset Levels he told locals that the cause of the flooding was ‘just the weather!’  What a pity he doesn’t read our local Clacton Gazette.  One of his disciples claims on the  latest ‘Readers Letters’ page that he has proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that the European Union must bear the blame for the floods!

            If I want advice on getting votes from a gullible electorate or evading awkward questions from prying journalists I might well seek the advice of politicians like ‘those Lawson and Farage fellows’.  But for an informed opinion about the weather I prefer to take the word of  an acknowledged expert such as ‘that Julia Slingo woman’ better known as Dame Julia Slingo the Meteorological Office’s chief scientist.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea…..

Holland (the Netherlands) resembles the Somerset Levels and the Norfolk Broads – but on a much larger scale.  Practically the whole country is at or below sea level.  Their weather is not unlike our own and they are certainly subject to the same tidal surges and storms as eastern England.  Like us, they were severely affected by the storm surge of 1953 that brought unprecedented death and destruction.

They learned its lessons though.  The Netherlands is much smaller than the UK. Despite this the Dutch government spends five times as much annually on flood defences as ours does.  It is money well spent.  The Netherlands has had none of the destructive floods that we have suffered and are suffering. Nor do they talk of the necessity of surrendering some rural areas to the sea in order to have more funds to protect major towns.  Much of their land has been reclaimed from the sea.   We saw on tv some of the Dutch sea defences under construction – they make our defensive walls of filled sandbags, and even of concrete, look pretty pathetic!

How can they afford it?  I know very little about the Netherlands’ economy. I do know though that their government doesn’t spend millions of pounds annually on Trident submarines, prowling the world’s oceans, bearing nuclear deterrents that haven’t yet deterred any actual threats (and there have been plenty of them!) to civilisation.  If those nuclear weapons were ever to be used they could herald the extinction of the human race.  I doubt if any native of the Netherlands loses a moment’s sleep at the thought that their country lacks the so-called ‘ultimate deterrent’.  They know that their tax money is spent combating the forces of nature, a real and present danger, not frittered away ‘impressing the neighbours’ and protecting the Netherlands from an imagined peril.

            Mind you, money spent on flood defences is only postponing the day of reckoning unless at the same time, at least as much money is spent on the development of sustainable sources of energy – sun, wind, waves, tides – to reduce, and ultimately end, humankind’s reliance on the fossil fuels that are producing climate change and extreme weather conditions world-wide.     

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Week 31 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Grandfathers

          Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, was born on 14^th November 1948.  I well remember hearing the official announcement of his birth on the radio. My 24 year old wife Heather and I had been married for two and a half years. We were living in a bungalow just off the Norwich Road in Barham, three or four miles north of Ipswich. In the autumn Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis.  She was confined to her bed and we were waiting to learn when she would be transported to a sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester..  There she was to spend more than a year, a period punctuated by six weeks in Papworth Hospital, where she underwent life-saving but  disabling surgery (thoracoplasty) involving the removal of eight ribs. This permanently collapsed her left lung allowing it to heal.

Visiting Heather in Nayland Sanatorium in summer 1949.   Patients having thoracoplasty were expected to lose a stone in weight during the surgery, which involved three operations with rests of a fortnight after the first and second. They were therefore required to put on a stone beforehand.  Heather was taken to Papworth for surgery a day or two after this photo was taken.  It is my only photo of Heather in which she appears to be 'plump'!  

In November 1948 we had our own worries and. I can’t pretend that we were particularly interested in the royal birth. I do though remember the BBC announcer telling us, with a plummy accent (BBC radio news-readers all spoke posh in those days!) that Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth ‘has given birth to a Prince’.  I remember thinking - and probably saying to Heather, ‘Fancy her giving birth to a prince.  I thought that members of the Royal Family had babies just like the rest of us!’

             Heather was discharged from the sanatorium ‘cured’. Despite her subsequent lifelong frailty, four years later she gave birth at home, to the first of our two sons. They, in due course, gave us three grandchildren, two boys and a girl.  Heather died at the age of 82, three months after our diamond wedding anniversary.  She had lived to see all three of her grandchildren grow through schooldays and adolescence and  graduate with good degrees at universities.

            Now, the baby prince who was born while Heather was waiting to be transported to the Sanatorium is himself a grandfather.   His grandchildren (I have no doubt that he’ll have more!) will have privileges ours have never known – but they certainly won’t have the freedom to choose their careers, their friends, their partners and their paths through life that ours have had.  I hope that if, like me, he reaches his nineties, he will be as proud of the progress of his grandchildren as I am of mine.  

My grandchildren!

           The youngest of my three grandchildren has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. This means that they are all beyond the first flush of youth and are making their way in the adult world.  I very much hope I’ll remember their birthdays, and that they’ll be pleased to receive my birthday greetings of love and good wishes for as long as I draw breath.  Here they are on the left – Chris, the oldest, Nick the youngest and Jo in the middle, with just a year dividing each of them, as they were years ago when they really were grandchildren. Below, now young adults, they are with me on the recent occasion of the family wedding of my son Pete (Chris and Nick’s dad and Jo’s uncle) and Arlene Esdaile.

        

All three are graduates (their grandma and I were both proud to leave school at 16 with our General Schools Certificate and Matric. Exemption!)  Jo is the real intellectual.  She is already an M.A. and an M.Sc.   She has been working as a Social Worker seconded to the Renal Unit of a large  Sheffield Hospital and  she has now been accepted for a Ph.D. Course studying clinical psychology at Sheffield University.  She’s a beauty too;  it’s really not fair

 on all the other girls!

            Chris has been teaching English in Taiwan for almost a decade. A few years ago he was named ‘Teacher of the year’ by the educational organisation employing him.  He speaks Mandarin like a native and I notice that on his ‘Facebook’ page he now puts messages in Chinese calligraphy!  He graduated in Fine Art and has produced pencil portraits of family members using old photographs as references.  One of his drawings of his grandma as the school-girl of 15 that she was when she and I first met, almost reduced me to tears when he gave it to me.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) aged 15 – drawn over 65 years later by her grandson Chris!    

I wrote about grandson Nick’s career in this blog a few weeks ago.  He graduated in Photography and after rising to the very top in the European Travel Agency, has founded and is the Managing Director of his own International Tourism Consultancy (www.SE1media.com) He has a charming Belgian girl-friend, Romy Cywie, who has been welcomed as a member of ‘the family’ (I now make a point of remembering her birthday too!)   Can you wonder that I am proud of my three grandchildren?

The Prince of Wales will be very fortunate if, at my age, he has a family as warm, as united and as supportive as I have.  I am only sorry that their grandma isn’t here to enjoy hearing about their activities and appreciating them all as much as I do.

 

St George of the Exchequer to the rescue!

           Interest on mortgages for house purchase is at an unprecedentedly low level.  Good news for borrowers but not so good for those of us who see our life savings entrusted to banks and building societies. Those savings are steadily decreasing in value as inflation outstrips interest rates. It also means that monthly mortgage repayments are low. They are within the capacity of a great many would-be home owners.  However, financial institutions have recent memories of being saved by government bale-outs from bankruptcy resulting from by unwise lending. To prevent a recurrence they are demanding much larger deposits – perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of the total loan required – before granting mortgages.   These are beyond the reach of most young people, particularly those who (thanks to the government’s policies) are already burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

            That’s .where George Osborne our Chancellor of the Exchequer rides in like a knight in shining armour, to save the situation.  He is going to lend those eager young couples the money they need for their deposits.  He started the scheme on quite a modest scale but is now proposing to widen the scheme to include purchasers of existing as well as new properties. Prospective home buyers will need to have saved no more than five percent of the money they hope to borrow from a bank or building society. This, he hopes, will not only help those who want to fulfil the Conservative dream of a nation of home-owners, but will also encourage developers to build and thus help Britain out of recession

And perhaps it will – eventually. Immediately though it has increased the demand for houses from those who, thanks to Mr Osborne’s generosity (with our money!) can aspire to home ownership.  It will take many months at least for any building programme to take effect.  In the meantime market forces will ensure that house prices once again rise above the rate of inflation until the bubble bursts and we have yet another financial crisis. This time the government has been warned by the Institute of Directors (hardly ‘loony lefties’!) of the probable results of their policy.   But, of course, ‘Nanny knows best’ and the government will continue pursuing the chimera of ‘Home Ownership for All’. Surely a time in which ‘no-one can expect a job for life’ is not one in which young people should be encouraged to get themselves into long-term debt.   What is needed is not affordable homes to buy but publicly owned houses to let at affordable rents, such as local authorities provided in the century prior to the advent of Thatcher/Blairism.

           It doesn't appear to have occurred to Mr Osborne that if loaning most of the deposit money required for house purchase was too risky for the banks and building societies, it might be too risky for him too.  Perhaps the thought would have crossed his mind had he been taking risks with his own money, rather than ours!