summer

So far we are having an interesting summer, with weather ranging from the autumnal to the tropical. KNMI are warning us that global warming goes much faster here than in the rest of Europe, presumably, because there is relatively little air pollution here. I still wonder why it is still being argued that if a global rise in temperature is not a phenomenon caused by humans, its consequences don’t really exist. Once you start getting in touch, the signs are everywhere, and they are pretty obvious. Change is happening, plants and trees bloom earlier, there are changes in the species of birds that breed here. That’s always a sure sign of climatic change, because most of our birds are migratory, so global changes in climate patterns are noticeable within a few years. Oddly, for a country where so much is about managing water, there has been a drought all through the spring, with a small hiatus during the last few weeks, but now it is continuing once more. What this means, for low areas that were reclaimed from the sea is that the water table sinks to such a level that sea water starts to penetrate. Farmers have been very vocal in demanding that the natural water table be lowered to give them more arable land. Now this practice is backfiring. Much farmland has been given “back to nature”, in a stupid attempt to create “the wild” where there was good farmland. One of our campaigns is to reverse this trend. May it succeed.