NOT everyone can be a hot-water bottle. It looks an easy life, stretched out in bed all night. But all that gurgling and burbling and radiating can wear you down. And the indignities! Scalding hot water poured into your bum and then shaken upside down to test you don’t leak! I raise this existential problem because Henry, my hot-water bottle in a fetching Mickey Mouse cover, is now in his 16th consecutive week of service with barely a night off since November.
A problem? It is, for him and me, having been assured by the relentless propaganda of the global warming industry that Henry could look forward to early retirement, basking in a sunny spot on top of the wardrobe, with those nights of gurgling and burbling and radiating behind him. Instead, he is working overtime in the front line against ... global cooling.
It is not just in Scotland that the long and earnestly prophesied onset of global warming has failed to materialise this year. Across America, Europe and Asia, this winter has been a big brrr. Earlier this month, there were fresh falls of snow in Jerusalem. In China, snow and freezing weather brought dislocation and chaos on a massive scale. The worst storms in 50 years cut power supplies and transport links to millions of people.
In North America, eastern districts have been hit by abnormally high levels of snow, well above the 30-year average. Greece has been gripped with winter storms. Athens has been blanketed by 4in to 6in of snow.
South America has experienced one of its coldest winters in decades, with snow in Buenos Aires for the first time since 1918. In South Africa, Johannesburg had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. In Afghanistan, more than 750 people have died in the harshest winter for decades and the heaviest snowfalls in 30 years. Further east, in Indian Kashmir, snow has been falling at an exceptional rate, with the region’s main highway to the outside world blocked.
In Western Greenland, temperatures of minus 30C have been recorded. Denmark’s Meteorological Institute reports that the ice between Canada and south-west Greenland has reached its greatest extent in 15 years.
And in the Antarctic, where it is currently high summer, ice has increased to its highest level ever recorded at this time of year, some 30 per cent above normal.
January 2008 has seen the largest area of Northern Hemisphere snow cover for the period of 1966-2008, just slightly higher than the largest anomaly of January 1984, with February likely to exceed that.
Might it just be that we have got it all wrong? That we are heading, not for a period of global warming, but global cooling?
