Wing & a Prayer Productions

As the month just gone was apparently the UK's hottest and dryest April on record (and doesn't our garden know it?), it seems strange to think back to the beginning of Decemeber when the nation apparently ground to a halt under the weight of snow, Christmas post didn't arrive for weeks into the New Year and national tabloid's were declaring a deep freeze till the end of February.

I say 'apparently' because, in this little corner of Berkshire we saw virtually no snow. We had one morning where we had enough snow to cover the ground but it had melted by the afternoon. Other than that-zip, nil, nada, nothing. The mounting stories of schools shut, vital deliveries of food etc being held up, travellers stranded, the economy grinding to a stand still-all of this seemed increasingly unreal as our front path remained snowflake free. As my friends on Facebook will know, I mooted the possibility there that this was actually a grand conspiracy, that actually there was no snow, it was just a hoax brewed up by the rest of the country to see if the inhabitants of Reading would fall for it.

Obviously I would be silly to deny that last year was a harsh winter for the UK. Even though the evidence in my immediate surroundings did not support such claims, I would have been very foolish indeed to deny the combined weight of the media and the eyewitness testimonies of friends and family.

Because of the heavy snow, there were an increasing number of voices saying that perhaps global warming was, after all, a myth. All the inhabitants of the UK (bar Reading) could see was the heaviest snow for years; how could the earth be getting warmer?

Yet, at the same time, scientists were declaring that 2010 was the hottest year globally on record.

Now, I'm not a scientist but here's the thing: Just because I couldn't see snow in my part of the UK, I would have been a moron to hold to my belief that the entire UK was snow free when it was anything but.

By the same token, just because our part of the world appears colder than usual, why are some people so quick to dismiss the evidence that the rest of the world is warming up?

And in view of the month just gone, that sort of logic looks shakier still.