Climate Change

There's been a lot of mud-slinging lately and I'd like it to come to an end.  Especially as, this being the Husborne Crawley community, a lot of it was real mud and I'm fed up having to get Burton to do so much laundry.

There has been a certain amount of suggestion recently that some people have been... let us say, presenting data in such a way as to suggest that global warming is more proven than it actually is.  Our own Climate Change Laboratory, in the shed at the bottom of the herb garden, has not escaped some of the fallout from these accusations.  Specifically, we predicted that there would be a beach just along the Ridgmont bypass, that we would be growing pineapples in the Orchard, and that the Gulf Stream would stop, resulting in temperatures falling to below -40F.  In retrospect, I can see that some of these predictions might have been overly pessimistic, and possibly even contradictory.

Now I have had the chance to check the data, I do agree that our predictions that Husborne Crawley would be by the seaside within 10 years were overly dramatic.  Husborne Crawley is a good 100m above sea level.  It's going to take more of a sea level rise than is currently predicted before we end up sun-bathing on Ridgmont Beach.  So on balance, while we are still deeply concerned about the threat of global warming, we're going to abandon the project to put the Great House on stilts.  The claim that I substituted millimetres for yards at a certain critical point in my  calculations is almost certainly unprovable, since I deleted all the emails.  And burnt the hard disk.

In unrelated news, I'm pleased to announce a huge profit in my speculations in long-term futures in sun-tan lotion, flip flops and grow-your-own pineapple kits.  It's been a funny market, and I notice that the price of all three has dropped sharply in the Husborne Exchange over the last day or two, so I'm glad I sold up on Wednesday.  I think I'll be steering clear of these commodities for the near future.