When 'climate change' isn't climate change
The internet has been very snowy of late.
Channel Five seems to be publicising its documentary about the Great Freeze of winter 1962-1963, somewhat inexplicably since 72 years isn’t an obvious anniversary point. Anyway: it’s triggered an outpouring of old photos and extraordinary memories of a winter when the snow was eight feet high in places, icicles hung from roofs for months and most of Britain froze solid.
I’ve found it all riveting. Comment after comment has resurrected a bygone world: it’s extraordinary how things have changed so much within living memory.
This was a time when it was still the norm to have an outside loo: quite how you managed when they were frozen solid for months and the snowdrifts were above your head I have no idea. Central heating was a bit of a novelty, so people were mostly huddling round fires clutching hot water bottles while the kitchen roof buckled under the weight of the snow. One 17-year-old railway worker had to give up on his motorbike (already a blisteringly cold prospect for the morning commute) after the gearbox froze. Somewhat unwisely, he tried defrosting it by lighting a fire underneath the petrol-filled bike. Tantalisingly, he neglected to mention how that worked out.
Mind you, this being the internet age, it isn’t long before people started to get snippy. First it’s “folk are soft these days – two inches of snow and the whole country shuts down.” Then someone mentions climate change.
The conversation goes something like this: “See – all this talk of climate change is a load of rubbish. London froze on Boxing Day 1962 and didn’t unfreeze again till the end of February 1963. If that happened nowadays everyone would be wailing about climate change. But we just knuckled down and got on with it. Just goes to show: there’s always been exceptionally deep snow, or torrential rain, or hurricanes or heatwaves.”
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