Dutch Winter Scenes
The National Gallery, London, will be showing Dutch Winter Scenes from 10 November to 2 January 2007, Room 1, admission free. These winter landscapes from the Gallery's collection reflect "The Little Ice Age" suffered by north-western Europe in the 17th century. It's all good Christmas fare, but ignores global warming. The UK has enjoyed a very warm October, so warm that most deciduous trees are still green, blackberry bushes are in flower and my resident wood pigeon has just fledged her sixth baby of the year! This is the good side. Wait till London and the Home Counties drown in glacial meltwater! Where will we put all the immigrants then? The Welsh hills and the Scottish mountains?
posted by Unknown @ 31.10.06
4 comments
4 Comments:
Back in the Seventies there was a run of very cold winters, and we were told that we were going into "instant glaciation". We were all going to freeze, and the cause was that we were burning too much fossil fuel, which was creating a haze that was reflecting heat back into space. Anyone who questioned "instant glaciation" was dismissed as a fool or a stooge of the oil companies.
Now, some of the same people who were crying "instant glaciation!" then are crying "global warming!". It's good that we have these works of art to remind us that climate varies naturally.
Hi, Alan
You wait till Yellowstone National Park blows up. Wipeout! It's due to happen any minute now.
I agree that most of the time it's not worth worrying about the gloom and doom brigade, but I remember the "killer smogs" of the late 50's, early 60's. I saw bus conductors walking in front of their buses holding flares to get round Piccadilly Circus! And thousands died. We don't get those smogs any more, thanks to the Clean Air Act.
I guess the answer is: If you can do something about it, worry your MP; if you can't, don't bother.
Worry or not, it's great we've got those lovely old landscapes as a record of how things were. And before anyone asks, I don't remember "frost fairs" on the Thames!
Anything that varies naturally can vary unnaturally - Hiesenberg's uncertaintly principle.
I am far from convinced that anyone really knows what's happening with the climate. But I do know that fossil fuels are a product of natural processes that have taken billions of years to create and that we have used most of it up in a couple of hundred.
Climate change or not, we are going to have, are beginning to have, an energy crisis.
I do believe I have a copy of this on a jigsaw puzzle up in the loft.
You've been reading Frank Herbert again!
It hasn't got a sound card underneath it, has it?
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