The truth is, I don't know. I'm not convinced anyone knows exactly how climate change is affecting our planet. Nor does anyone know how quickly it's happening or whether it will last. “Oh, it's just cyclical," people say. But perhaps it's terminal. Maybe the planet's hitting back after two and a half centuries of industrial man's abuse and the ravages of our carefree explosion to seven billion mouths, announced last week. What if these signals are a sort of Gaia comeuppance? Perhaps the plants and insects know better than us - they're certainly more sensitive and less devious - and maybe we should heed their omens.
What I do know is that it's not just plants and bugs. Just last week, in the middle of that blast of southerly wind streaming off the Sahara, I watched our rooks back working their nests only vacated in June. They were paired off and were building - yes, building - by bringing in sticks, a pair-bonding activity normally reserved for February. I watched one bird, presumably female, settle in the nest as though she was thinking of laying. She stayed there for nearly an hour, while her partner perched loyally on a branch beside her, just as they do in spring. Then they took off and flew round a bit, cawing loudly as though they were confused, which they almost certainly were. Finally, they sat sulkily beside the nest for the rest of the day. These nests are in huge old limes, oaks and horse chestnuts now just about finished shedding their leaves. Rooks are supposed to build their nests among buds, not in autumn's last gasp. Hardly surprising they were confused.
A few days later they gave up and left with the warm wind. Here in Highland Scotland that wind had awarded us an almost record 17ºC (62.6ºF in baby-boomers' money) for late October, while our son, James, and his fiancée were basking in 22ºC (71.6ºF) in their Fulham garden, where the sweet peas were still flowering vigorously for the fifth consecutive month. Now it's turned cool, though still very mild for November, and the rooks have ganged up into rowdy flocks and reverted to normal onset-of-winter behaviour, working the stubble fields.
Climate abnormalities are occurring with apparently greater frequency all over the globe. Massachusetts has just had an unseasonal dump of three feet of snow, flash floods have ripped through Italian towns, Beijing and Bangkok are under water and the streets of Dublin are awash. In recent years, high winds have played havoc with our mature trees; trees that have withstood 150 years of gales have been shattered and thrown over. Read the full report here.
Source: by John Lister-Kaye, The Telegraph, U.K.
