First snow - last snow?

So, it came in the night - at last we have some winter weather! But the snow won’t last. It’s enough to create the obligatory travel chaos, but this is not a serious cold period.

A programme on BBC TV the other night examined what life and the weather may well be like in 2020, 2050 and 2080 if current global warming trends continue. Just to give you a sense of where we’re going, there’s a farmer in the south of England who’s planting olive trees and who has already cropped some mature black olives.

Sea levels will rise, storms and the resultant storm surges in the sea around the coast will get bigger; more and more land will be inundated. I worry for my grandchildren.

It’s too late to stop the changes that will hit us by 2020, but we can, if we work together in a systematic and united way, stop things becoming worse by 2050 and 2080. It puts me in mind of Baha’u'llah’s writings that compare the world to a human body. The whole body can flourish only if the parts flourish; and the parts can flourish only if the whole flourishes.

Later
As I thought, the obligatory travel chaos happened. As the Evening Standard headlined it:

BEATEN BY AN INCH OF SNOW

Rail and Tube bosses were slammed today over the London travel chaos caused by an inch of snow.

Here’s what was reported in the Daily Telegraph.

By the way, why do the media always use the word “slammed” when they mean criticized? Doors are slammed. An attacker might slam someone in the face. But somehow to criticize someone is always to “slam” them in media speak. I guess “slam” is shorter and sounds stronger. But it does draw rather bizarre pictures in my mind.

As it happened, my journey into London was relatively trouble free, if we ignore the closed ticket office, the queue for the one automatic ticket machine, which refused to read my credit card. Oh, and the four-coach train for a load that really needed eight coaches. So, many of us had to stand all the way to London.

No, it’s not a big deal, it’s only 30 minutes, but I was catching the first off-peak train of the morning. Lots of people catch the first off-peak train of the morning. It’s always crowded. But the train operators (First Capital Connect) seem unable to produce a train of the right length for the job. Mind you, we’re better off than the Bath to Bristol commuters who have to travel on trains run by another First Group company, First Great Western. But that’s another story, and not for now.

Anyway, got to London OK, not too late. But then there are delays, serious and minor, on every single Underground line. So the trip to my first meeting this morning took three hops rather than two and a delay waiting for a District Line train at Embankment.

Most of the delays were caused by multiple signal failures and points failures. You may wonder why an underground system is affected by snow. You may well wonder. And I’m going to tell you. (It’s at this point that my kids would groan and say that dad is going to give one of his lectures. But I’m not, I promise.) It’s for the obvious reason that much of the system away from central London runs on the surface.

So you would think that the powers that be would protect points and signals from failure because of bad weather. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

Tailender
Here are some readers’ pictures of the snow from the BBC website.

Technorati Tags: winter, snow, global warming, England, Baha’u'llah, London, First Capital Connect, First Great Western

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