Thankfully, the North East of England has escaped most of the really bad flooding, but you guys who live further down the country, hope you're on high ground.

We've had some lousy summers in this country, but I can't remember the M1 being closed, stacks of trains not running, people trapped in factories as well as homes and cars, and whole villages being evacuated in case a dam bursts.

Hells teeth, what next?

Apparently more rain at the weekend It has been awful here in Yorkshire with some people losing their lives.

Seeing rivers flowing down the streets seems so unreal, the speed at which the flooding occurs is scary, the drains etc cannot cope, and the land is still wet from the floods of a couple of weeks ago.

Summer, where are you?

Hi Hazelnut
Sorry to here about all the flooding, and loss of life is never good.
Here in Australia we are still struggling with drought conditions.
However in south east Victoria "Gippsland" they are also having heaps of rain and bad flooding today.
The worlds weather patterns have gone a bit crazy, must be global warming?
Up in some parts of the high country "north east victoria" we had 20cm "8 inches" snow fall over the last 24hours, then again it is winter here.

It's always upsetting with the loss of life, but it always makes me smirk when everybody jumps on the 'global warming' band-wagon when a weather disaster occurs.
Yes, I will admit that some 'issues' may be down to how we have destroyed our own protection (primarily from last century), but a lot has to do with natural evolution.
Since time began (or at least since the earth we know evolved) the planet has been in an 'eb-and-tide' of (global) seasons. We (our ancestors) have went through heatwaves / droughts / floods / ice-cap recession / ice-cap growth (remember ice-age) over the ages, and 'that' is what we need to remember.
Don't let your governments blame you & make you pay for something that you (in reality) cannot do anything about - ever, full-stop.
(you know if we all stop every polluting activity today it will still take at least 200 years to make an 'adequate' impact ...!

Recorded history is very short - relatively speaking - and we have not much previous experience of radical weather. After all the Earth is x million years old - and we have records for, say, 200 years ...?

Hmmm, just realised I went off on a bit of a rant and a bit off subject ... sorry about that. It's still kinda relevant (I think)

B.

4.5 million years old - give or take a few thousand years

So is that your excuse for doing nothing. It will take centuries to undo, so why bother?

If man kind has even any sort of responsibilty to this planet, it is to leave the planet is somesort of habitable state for both our children and the rest of the animal kingdom - right now we are doing precious little.

God help us we may find out we can do nothing, but lets not sit on our fat, arrogant backsides claiming there is nothing we can do, whilst pumping millions of tons of s**t into the atmosphere... and in the meantime while we debate the subject, the rest of the planet dies around us.

To say we are not destroying the Earth we live in, is sticking your head in the sand and not listening to, or believing most of the scientific world.

Doing nothing because you might have to pay an few extra dollars to run your 4x4 or your air-con is just plain selfish.

There is no excuse for doing nothing.

Hi burtman
I forgot to put a question mark (?) at the end of "must be global warming"
I'm not in the habit of jumping on any band-wagons!

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we should do nothing (anything we do do will only have an affect hundreds of years from now)
What I was getting at is that suddenly 'we' are to blame and 'we' must sort it out ... 'we' have to pay more tax for using a fuel that was invented 150 years ago. The damage was done then, but it is now in the 'cleaner' age of things that we are being bullied into paying for clean-up.
It is even more futile when you consider that 65% of the worlds' pollution etc. is from countries that do not want to sign-up to the Kyoto Agreement.
We in Britain were told that if we did this & did that we could reduce our carbon footprint by nearly 40% - sounds good until you work out that Britain alone only contributes a total of 2% of the world emissions. 40% of 2% ain't much no matter how you look at it.
Yes, if we all did something we could (eventually) clean-up this planet (but the key is 'all')

What I was getting at was the 'high-and-mighty' governments that like to blame us 'minions' for polluting the planet as if it was our fault that the industrial revolution happened. I wasn't saying that we should do nothing - of course we should, but I don't want to be made as if it is my fault, and my fault alone that there is a hole in the atmosphere.

Anyway, I eat cardboard - that's bound to help

The bad weather continues, my garden turning white as it slowly but surely gets covered in hail stones in a thunder storm, it is more like December than July out there at the moment.

It's now been hot couple of days here in Finland. Before that, it was rainy and cloudy weather. Let's hope that this shine weather continues...