Oil be blowed!

Well, Llandudno TC has decided to cancel the fireworks tonight and shelve the whole thing until next year. Which is a pity, but understandable,given the rather dire forecast. December is being very...Decemberish, with the snows on the Carneddau remorselessly advancing to lower levels each day.  Which is very pretty, if you didn't know that the Ogwen team are almost certainly going to be called out at some point to rescue the hapless, the unprepared and the sheer daft. But there's something delightful about seeing the snow, layering the fourteen peaks and edging, like scrappily prepared frosting, ever lower.

Meanwhile, the BBC's excellent Newswatch (0750 Saturdays - BBC1) found itself having to defend its coverage of the theft of the emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. There are those, you see, who wonder if the Global Warming stories are all part of some massive conspiracy, created to stop us enjoying life to the full, with gas-guzzling cars, electricity hungry devices and plastic bags.

What's probably sad, however is that the message about consumption isn't really getting through.  The plastic bag story, which revealed that millions of Tesco bags are strangling the ocean, somewhere, didn't think to mention that plastic comes from oil, oil is certainly not going to last forever, and that - really - we're all still living in the aftermath and with the mindset of the industrial revolution.

Nuclear power is being hailed as the energy source for the 21st C, which it could be, although Nuclear fusion is the real hope for the future, and yet our method of generating electricity is still almost horse-and-cart.  All the nuclear option does is produce a lot of heat, which boils water, which turns turbines which generate electricity. in the short term, we'll need nuclear, as oil is simply getting much harder to extract, but fission comes with its own problems - notably the rather unpleasant waste products.

All of this is being ignored, however, as the row over data falsification continues. What we need is for climatologists to come clean, admit that no one really understands weather (it's far too complex at the moment), but we do know that the earth itself is warming, when all the astrophysical data suggest the opposite ought to be happening and we absolutely need to stop waste and profligacy.  If they did that, then they may well be taken more seriously.