I’ve spent my day watching Dodgeball. It’s been fun.
Tomorrow looks like less fun, not because of the Dodgeball, but because of the weather:
Level 6 is pretty hectic. To put it in perspective, Level 0 is “Turned out nice again, Gromit”, and Level 10 is the Apocalypse.
So things might be a bit rough over the next 48 hours.
I shall shelter next to a Dodgeball court in town.
Today is lovely. Blue skies, slight breeze, swallows swooping up above.
But remember how I predicted the end of winter about 5 weeks ago? In retrospect, that was funny because it’s been crap weather ever since. And I then said something of the lines of:
Actually, we want spring to come at the normal time, which is probably about a month from now. Because while the dams might be nice and full (99.6% this week, down from 100.4% last week, to be exact), we need them to be like that in the middle of September too, when spring should start.
Well, we’re there now, the dams are still full, and while there are a few signs that Spring is on the way, Winter is going to have one (last?) blast at us this weekend, but weirdly, in a Summery kind of way.
There’s a cut-off low expected from tomorrow through until Monday. More often seen in warmer months (which this is not), cut-off lows are characterised in the Western Cape by gale force South Easterly winds and heaps (and heaps) of rain. Experts will tell you that water is not known for its heaping properties, so if the rain is making heaps, you know that there’s a lot of it.
People in the know have been bouncing around numbers like 100mm and 90kph for the precipitation and the gusting winds. Those are fairly significant numbers at any time, but especially when our local ground is already saturated from a seemingly endless winter and our local trees have been battered very recently.
Will that be it then, though? Winter weather-wise? Well, while* there’s nothing nasty in the immediate aftermath of this long weekend’s fun and games:
You’d be hard-pushed to suggest that an average high of 20 would constitute a definite return of Spring to Cape Town.
But at least there’s the sight of a yellow blob each day from Tuesday onwards.
Maybe… just maybe… warmer times are ahead.
* argh! accidental alliteration. awkward.
Number 1 in a series of 1.
As always with landscaping, there needs to be a clean site to begin, so Walls Come Tumbling Down, but by the time we get to our Long Hot Summer, you’ll be in your Promised Land and you’ll want Shout To The Top! of your voice about how good your garden looks.
I’m so sorry.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth – especially on social media – over the recent big waves and high tides which hit South Africa’s south coast on Friday and Saturday. The combination of spring tides and a moerse end of winter storm led to damage all the way from Cape Town to Durban.
It had the climate change people claiming that it was likely down to climate change, and the climate change deniers… er… denying it. It’s all in the name.
The fact is that neither party can honestly prove anything.
One can’t pin down the huge storm surge on the weekend directly to a change in the climate. As mentioned above, there were a combination of factors which led to the flooding and the damage that we saw.
But equally, it’s absolutely no good saying that it wasn’t down to climate change just because “there was a storm surge 10 years ago”*. Climate is a very long term thing. You’re thinking of weather.
Climate refers to the long-term regional or global average of temperature, humidity and rainfall patterns over seasons, years or decades. While the weather can change in just a few hours, climate changes over longer timeframes.
The fact is that while no one single weather event is directly or wholly attributable to climate change, climate change means that we will see an increase in the number of these sort of events.
They will happen more often, and they may be more severe.
It’s not rocket science. (That’s an entirely different discipline.)
Look, if you will, at the heat in the UK. We covered this last year, when it got ridiculously hot. That was very definitely weather, but if you take a look at the trends over several decades you can see that hot days are getting hotter, and they’re getting hotter, quicker. That’s the climate, so we can expect even hotter days in the future, even more often.
Of course, then there’s the thorny subject of whether we (mankind, humans) are responsible for this change in the climate (that does or does not exist, depending on your intelligence). Yeah, I think that everything points towards us having a hand in it. But even if it’s not all down to us, why wouldn’t you want to make the world a bit of better place by not chucking out quite as many toxic fossil fuel fumes, even if it’s just because they’re toxic? With the lovely byproduct of less CO2 and less climate change.
Keep going like we are, and the only good thing that can happen is that a few more awful restaurants might end up in the Indian Ocean. And that’s scant reward considering the horrific consequences for the rest of the planet.
* which washed away a terrible restaurant in Struisbaai and almost actually made me believe in some higher power.
After the disaster that was yesterday: least said, soonest mended, although there are a couple of points that need to be made. Namely that while it was a great effort, it’s the W-D-L and Pts* columns that matter, because there is no “Played against a Top 6 team and almost got something from the game” column, and there never has been.
And worth saying that there is – and there never will be – any excuse for the racist abuse and threats against his family that our goalkeeper has had to face from the Spurs keyboard warriors online. Utterly disgusting. I will enjoy every moment of those “fans” being found and banned for life (noting that much of the stuff I saw came from overseas, especially SE Asia).
Anyway, in a 24 hour break from real sport, I’m going to head to a warehouse in Retreat (yep, seriously), and watch South Africa’s rugby union team play out what should be a really tight and competitive game against Romania.
Rugby is a big deal in SA, and I’m not sure that the locals understand quite how much it isn’t a big deal in other countries, like Romania. Even less so (I’m guessing) in Moldova, who one local estate agent seems to think are taking on the Springboks in Bordeaux this afternoon.
(I know Moldova isn’t far away from Romania. But I know it’s not Romania, too.)
Anyway. Whoever they’re playing. Let’s give this a go, and then I can get back for some proper sport from Liverpool and Spain a bit later on.
* incidentally, our PTSD column will be huge after yesterday