Highlighting the needy with Anthony Bernard.

Our own weather this year brought a wet and windy spring followed by a cool and mixed summer, September is now the start of autumn. 

Serious Global Warming is concentrated elsewhere!  When climate first became a concern, a scientist projected that the British Isles would become cooler due to changes in the ocean Gulf Stream.  Meteorologists nowadays blame the jet stream, not ocean currents. 

More people worldwide die from excessive heat and dehydration than are killed by floods and hurricanes.  Certainly there have been awful situations in India and Saudi Arabia, excessive temperatures in southern Europe with fires threatening Athens and Turkey, and huge storms sinking a superyacht off Italy.  Maybe west country holidays will become attractive for cooler days to escape Mediterranean extremes! 

Last year saw record breaking heat across Asia, catastrophic floods with 4,300 killed in East Africa, an extended cyclone in southern Africa killing 1,000 and displacing 500,000 people. Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, and Guam were battered by Typhoon Mawar; cyclone Mocha beat up Myanmar.  Extreme summer heat in southern Europe and the USA brought wildfires while last year Devon had record rain causing storm overflows and outrage over sewage.    

This year has brought excessive heat across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. 1,000 people died from heat and dehydration during a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, while hospitals in Pakistan, and neighbouring India were overwhelmed amid weeks of extreme temperatures. Typhoon Gaemi devastated Taiwan and hundreds were killed in southern India after rain caused landslides. 

Climate activists get excited about fossil fuels being extracted, but the real problem is that we burn these in cars, airplanes and industry.  Electric cars make good publicity, but the steel to build them, the manufacture of batteries and mining of lithium, all use vast amounts of energy.  So the problem is not what we find and dig up, but how we use the energy.  It is our demand for fossil fuels that pushes companies to produce them. 

China is a major contributor to global warming, but it is we who drive this by our excitement for cheap manufactured goods.  Many of these are plastic, which leads to the problem of plastic pollution.  Research is seeking enzymes to break down plastics, but has not yet reached the stage where plastic lavatory seats could be eaten away!  Anti-plastic activists will cheer when it happens! 

We all now want what we want, and want it immediately, hoping that scientists and politicians will enable us to have our cake and eat it.  Industry and retailers make things easy and cheap, wrapping stuff in plastic.  Biscuits used to come in large tins, from which a paper bag was filled and weighed.  We walked to the shops, or had children fetch things on their bicycles, as happened to me 75 years ago!  Plastic wrapped packages are more expensive, but convenience, self service and cars to fetch things and ferry children have become the norm. 

The internet and social media use massive amounts of energy in electrical circuits. Their electronics needs even more power for cooling systems.  Worldwide management should relocate all these to Iceland, whose electricity is generated from hot springs, but Americans like to retain control so most data hubs are in the USA.  

As we all want more, a saying comes to mind "be careful what you pray for, you may get it!". The consequences are already too obvious.