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Sunday 11th 36F, heavy overcast with rain, snow or sleet in no particular order. Internet back down to 84Mbps from a "guaranteed" 200Mbps.
A walk to the lanes in hooded, winter jacket and baggy over-trousers. Clouds of wet snow scudded across uniform prairies. Sparse, hedgerows, inadequate to hinder the blinding onslaught. Decimated, as they were, by the flail of the traffic impeding, tractor slasher. Broken limbs still lying where they fell onto the littered battlefield for commercial, monogrammed, advertising landfill.
Brown and white, acrid smoke, whipped from low chimneys on squat houses. Cowering amongst their imported shrubbery against another unseasonal thrashing. My wet clothes went into the bath to drain off. While I returned to my throne at the computer keyboard. Still warm, dry and largely unscathed.
10.30 33F and half an inch of wet snow is pitching.
Another "climate" issue is making the news in Denmark. Denmark is already intensively farmed at 62% land cover. With marshland a prime target for yet more of the same. Drain it and it and the land releases masses of CO2 from the waterlogged soil and plant residue. So some farmers wanted to be allowed to flood their marshland and build solar farms. A double win for wildlife and the climate? The "Climate friendly" government said no. If they built solar panels on their wetlands their taxes would rise by nine times. Because it would be classed as industrial production. Rather than intensive, industrial, crop farming with huge machines.
A similar discussion surrounds the issue of depleted quarries. Should they be soil covered and returned to intensive agriculture? Or be allowed to flood and become nature reserves? One local quarry became another golf course, wildlife desert. Another is flooded and already well stocked with water birds. This is despite the relative "rawness" of the still naked, recently landscaped banks. Trees and shrubs will flourish. To provide shelter, privacy and security for ever increasing wildlife.
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