Blog Action Day: What does climate change mean to you?
This morning I’ve been lucky enough to be out in a beautiful garden in the company of a good friend. All in the name of work you understand – I’m researching plants for a project, and my friend is a professional gardener. But under a blue sky, with the leaves turning and wagtails busying themselves on the lawns, it felt more like a guilty pleasure.
On days such as these, it’s easy to forget that the climate as we know it is in trouble. Yet as I plunder my friend’s horticultural knowhow for all it’s worth, I’m reminded.
Because as I attempt to fit the names of the plants he recommends into neat seasonal boxes, he mentions that many of the flowering times in the reference books are out of date. He says that the climate has changed so much in the 20 years he’s been gardening that some of the tried-and-tested rules, which held true for generations, no longer seem to apply.
With our infamously unpredictable weather, British gardeners have presumably long been fatalistic about the prospects for their plants from one year to another. But if weather is a game, rapid climate change is the pitch shifting underneath it – making it harder for anyone to predict the result.
For the birds
I’m not much of a gardener – ask my neighbours – so I’m in no position to verify my friend’s observations with personal notes of my own.
However, I have been a fairly obsessive birdwatcher since the age of nine – that’s nearly 25 years ago – and have followed the changing fortunes of the birds over that time. And it’s clear that something’s afoot.
Exhibit A: the Chiffchaff, a small green warbler with a sweet two-tone song, which is usually our first summer-visiting songbird of spring. But while most of our Chiffchaffs still travel up from the wintering grounds around the Med to spend the summer here, more and more don’t seem to migrate at all, or actually arrive from elsewhere in Europe and spend the winter here.
That means in mid-March, when you would traditionally have expected to have heard the first one of the summer, it’s hard to be sure that you’re not listening to a bird that’s actually the last one of the winter – or even the one that never bothered going anywhere.
Similarly some resident birds on the northern edge of their range in the UK – Dartford Warblers, Woodlarks, Cetti’s Warblers – are spreading from former toe-holds in the south of England to colonise further and further north, spurred on it seems by a succession of mild winters.
So far, so what? These are all birds that seem to be doing better, at least on our shores.
But then there’s the bad news: rapidly disappearing summer birds, mainly those with long migration routes, such as Cuckoos, Turtle Doves and Spotted Flycatchers. I remember these birds as common when I was growing up in the 80s – now if see or hear one it’s worthy of a geeky blog post..
The jury’s still out on the exact causes of these phenomena – local problems in the African wintering grounds and the shooting of migrants around the Mediterranean may be more or less responsible . But it seems entirely likely that a change in climate in one or more points along their marathon journeys is making that twice-annual phenomenon even more difficult to complete.
Blog Action Day
Today is Blog Action Day: a movement aiming to make connections about issues that matter. Today I’ve read blog posts from all over the world – some brilliant, some dreary. One that caught my attention was by DFID (now UKAid’s) Martin Leach about the plight of farmers in East Africa, and his worries for how climate change could worsen circumstances already shaped by war, famine and poverty.
But for me, and I suspect for many other people, it’s appreciation of what surrounds us every day that’s most likely to change the way we behave. For some, that might be their garden. For me, it’s the birds that migrate to Africa at this time every year, and return in diminishing numbers the following spring – tied to the fortunes of the land and people along the route their species has chosen for thousands of years.
The question is: can we change our route?
Starting with energy
Climate change is the big driver behind our energy-saving challenges, which we’re undertaking this month and beyond in a bid to find out what really makes a difference to our carbon footprints (and electricity bills). You can follow our progress on the energy section of Living, and via Twitter.
And if you watch one six-minute video this Blog Action Day, watch DECC’s new climate advisor David Mackay explain exactly how big the energy challenge facing the UK is – in light bulbs.
How Many Light Bulbs? from Cambridge Ideas from Cambridge University on Vimeo.
Swallow on wire image by Flickr user Dave Hamster
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Originally posted 2009-10-15 23:39:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
