This weekend, I was chatting to a newfound friend about seasons. She has just returned from a two-year stint teaching English in Japan. Apparently, over there the question "which is your favourite season?" is as common small talk as "so, what do you do?" This is because Japan`s cities are planned around a seasonal aesthetic, so that each time of year has its own particular botanical beauty.
If we take a look at Europe`s scorching summer, or even Cape Town`s rainless winter, it is possible to pick up a disturbing trend.
Georgina Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb
She waxed extensive about her affection for spring, which I share, but sitting on my stoep on Sunday afternoon, this latest version of spring that we are having seemed less than appealing. Winter went, summer came, temperatures are soaring, and (this being the crux of my concern) while rain clouds may skitter across our white-hot skies, they are singed into nothingness by the relentless sun.
I wouldn`t have a problem with all this heat if I felt in any way confident of the repetition of the usual Highveld seasonal cycle of thundershowers following sunshine. However, if we take a look at Europe`s scorching summer, or even Cape Town`s rainless winter, it is possible to pick up a disturbing trend. It`s getting frighteningly warmer, and increasingly dryer.
But it seems that the more evidence we have of some sort of global temperature crisis impending, the more blas'e the powers that be are becoming about doing anything about it. While the nineties saw a worldwide bandwagon-jumping race to Save the Planet, the noughties have brought anti-war campaigning (fair enough) and a general apathy towards the environmentalist fads of the last decade.
Every time another polar ice-shelf collapses into the ocean, while there is worldwide media coverage, there is also worldwide media reassurance that no one can prove whether this can be attributed to global warming or just the cyclical rise and fall of the earth`s climate. Governments scratch their heads and examine their emergency plans when Europeans start dropping like flies after an unusually hot summer. George Bush`s Clean Air Policy (his response to the Tokyo accord which aims to reduce greenhouse gases) has actually been found to cause an increase in emissions.
But the threat of an overheating planet seems to have been relegated to the same file as vegetarians, crystal-gazers and tree-huggers by international focus groups. New Scientist even reported on Sunday that the world`s oil and gas reserves will run out too soon for the doomsday global warming scenarios to be realised.
That`s fine, except for one glaring fact. It`s already getting warmer. This year alone saw several wineries in the Cape unable to produce suitable grapes for harvest. The Namaqualand daisies didn`t make their appearance thanks to the Cape`s hot dry winter. Temperatures over 30 degrees are a little more than I find clement this early in the spring. And nobody`s doing a thing about it.
This column has been written in the hopes that the usual journalistic cycle of writing about the absence of something the day before it finally arrives holds. Bring on the thundershowers!
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