Changing weather and climate change

Having spent most of the week travelling to and from and then around London and the West Midlands I've seen plenty of weather.

It feels very much like it did during the occasional big freezes of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The mother-in-law of all big freezes was the 1962/63 winter. I remember walking home on Boxing Day in the snow. None of us realised that it would still be around nearly ten weeks later. I made a small fortune clearing paths and entries for people. Where there's a problem there's a potential profit!

By the way we only had three days off school and that was because the coal stock was exhausted in early March. Myself and several other "volunteers" spent an entire day taking the coal from the kerbside to the boiler house. I particularly remembered it because we were, even for London in the early sixties, a really multi-racial bunch. The school was my only experience of central heating. I didn't have central heating at home until I moved to my present house in 1994.

The great thing about 1962/63 was that the snow actually fell as snow and then settled. The one thing you learn as a child in East London is that large urban areas have their own micro-climate about 2 or 3 degrees higher than the surrounding countryside. This temperature difference was plotted in the school geography books of the time and discussed by every London schoolboy. This  normally meant that when snow was falling in the South East, London, especially East London, would be honoured with sleet or cold rain. We'd look at envy when we saw newspaper pictures of kids in Harlow or Guildford having the time of their lives on sledges: if we were very lucky, it would fall in the early hours and stay around until lunchtime by which time the micro-climate had caused it to become slush.

In 1962/3 London was one of a handful of cities in the world that had a population in excess of 8 million. Since then urbanisation and population growth mean that many other cities the size of London have been built across the world together with their own micro-climates. The raw edge of winter is reduced a little and in summer the concrete, steel and tarmac absorb the heat and exaggerate the temperature.

At the same time lifestyles have changed to place more pressure on resources. In 1962/3 we would heat just one room at home with coal. We would bath once a week (mind you we were thought to be "posh" because our post war council prefab had a bath!), we would  change our underwear once a week, after the bath, and have two or three school shirts which were washed at  the weekend. We had just one television, no computers, no telephones, none of the electricity guzzling "appliances" that are casually left on standby 24 hours a day in many modern homes. So I suspect the micro-climates of large cities have become more pronounced.

The reason I say this is that I fear that great swathes of sincere, very well meaning Christians, are allowing themselves to be hooked into an obsession about climate change that is actually replacing the gospel as the core activity of Christian experience. Obviously we have to conserve the world's resources and use them wisely. Obviously we have to take a precautionary approach when pumping minerals into the sky, as we have when the impact of acid rain became visible. But, and it is an important but, we shouldn't replace our reliance on our Creator with a near-pagan worship of creation.