(Thank you, Private Frazer.)

The Climate Change summit in Copenhagen has failed to come up with a binding agreement. No surprise there. President Obama, in particular, was always going to find any sort of deal hard to sell at home, and harder again to implement. China and India are understandably reluctant to hamper themselves in their efforts to attain higher living standards.

Still, Private Frazer’s catch phrase is only too appropriate. Over-exploiting our resources to the point of catastrophe is something humans seem to do.

The Easter Islanders and the Maya are more than likely to have contributed to the demise of their environments. Water extraction in the south-western United States is outstripping replacement – so much so that the Rio Grande is now little more than a trickle in some stretches. And the fall of the Sumerian and Roman Empires may well have been due to their over exploitation of wood resources.

While global warming – whether or not it’s occurring (natural fluctuations mean the trend is anything but smooth yet average yearly world temperatures over the past few decades tend to be higher than at any time on record; with the highest being more recent) and whether or not it’s human-made – may or may not lead to deleterious climatic and environmental consequences, it seems axiomatic to me that we as a species couldn’t keep throwing all sorts of stuff into the atmosphere (and the oceans) without causing damage of some sort; damage which may be irreparable in the short term.

In this respect it is possible that ocean acidification due to uptake of CO₂ may even be more of a disaster for non-human species than warming of the atmosphere and seas.

It may seem strange to be going on about this when the country is experiencing what used to be appropriate seasonal weather but if the North Atlantic Conveyor – sometimes known as the Gulf Stream – switches off, we’re in for a lot of this. Think Labrador; with bells on. It has switched off in the past and an influx of fresh water from melting Greenland ice sheets will mean Arctic waters won’t be dense enough to sink they way they do now.

Still; no overall agreement may be better than a flawed agreement. But only if lessons are learned.

The junketing involved at Copenhagen has been an unedifying spectacle. And such gatherings attract all sorts of ancillary activities which only contribute to the problem they are affecting to solve.

There must be a better way to deal with the world’s problems than this.

This morning it was pretty dark when I left the house. Well, it is only one week away from the shortest day and the overcast didn’t help. But it seemed much worse than last week and Friday was only three days ago. It was still more or less dark when I got to work and also when I left to drive home. So I’ve barely seen any daylight.

Dawn still gets progressively later over the next week and even though sunset has passed its earliest by now it gets later by a smaller margin so the days still shorten.

Had the clocks not changed in October I would already have had a month or so of travelling to work in the dark (with daylight only appearing around ten o’clock) and there would have been little or no lightness in the evening to compensate. Plus after the New Year another month of the same grind to get through.

(I’ve heard that people in Norway who only get one hour of daylight at this time of year don’t bother with it and just keep their curtains closed.)

As it is the mornings will be brightening from the beginning of January. And there’s a holiday season coming up. Reasons to be cheerful. Maybe.

I might give the game tomorrow night a miss, though.

That tree I mentioned last year is on the turn again.

I fogot to check it on Monday but made sure to yesterday and there were definite signs of yellow leaves.

Maybe it’s a species that just does this at the back end of August/beginning of September but it seems extremely early to me.

It might be another not very good winter.

Yesterday I drove my son and his girlfriend to Prestwick for them to pick up a flight to Belgium. Lucky so and sos.

It was a good day for it what with the sun splitting the pavements (as my father used to say.)

To break the trip up the good lady and I dropped into an antique centre at Garrion on the way back. The centre, which is part of a complex including a Garden Centre, various retailing ventures and the obligatory tea/coffee shop, is named after the two bridges which carry the A71 across the Clyde a couple of hundred metres west from there.

We didn’t actually buy anything yesterday but I include this link just in case anyone wants to go.

The bridges themselves are quite scenic so I took a few pictures.

This is the older bridge (the northern of the two.) Due to the short distance between the two bridges I couldn’t get the whole of this one in a single frame so this is actually a stitched together amalgam of two photographs.

This is the newer bridge which has a nice arched span. It was built in 2001. The two act as a kind of roundabout a bit like a motorway flyover. Westbound traffic takes the new bridge, eastbound traffic the old one.

Here’s the view from the southern bridge.

Scotland in summer. Don’t you just love it?

This morning I woke to about a centimetre of snow lying outside. Typical, I thought. My week for the car.

As soon as I had scraped the windows and lights, got 50 metres from the house and onto a bus route it was all salted away, though. No hold ups, no problem. Work as usual.

It was just about all gone when I got home again. Ah well.

I don’t know why it is but I always seem to have less time for doing stuff when I am on holiday.
Partly this is because I set the alarm for later and tend to have a lie-in (note: this is never called a lay-in, even the tin-eared do not say that) beyond the time it goes off.
I also relax and mooch around a bit.

It’s worse at Christmas and New Year, though, because the time always gets taken up, by last minute shopping, making sure we have enough milk and bread etc for the two days the supermarkets are closed for – only one day over New Year this year, surprisingly – and visiting family and the like.

So today it was back to work and it didn’t feel like I’d had a holiday at all. (I’m not asking for sympathy; I know shop workers had even less time off than me.)

On a cheerier note, the sky was brightening when I left the house, not something I could say was true of any time in December, so the mornings are certainly progressing in the right direction.
It was icy underfoot, though, not a typical occurrence outside Son Of The Rock towers. it had warmed up by the time I got home but tonight looks icy again.

It also snowed during the day in Dunfermline, but only a little. This made the surroundings brighter and cheerier. All that white on the rooftops seemed clean, somehow, and the air was clear. I could almost feel summer a-coming in.

(I suspect a lot more postponements between now and then though. They will cost us.)

So, it begins.

Today’s postponement might be a one-off, but from here it looks like a long, hard winter. The frost didn’t lift all day in my back garden – and we’re not prone to much in the way of frost here – and its been a cold, cold week all in. We’re only just in December.

If we win on Tuesday night, that’ll be the home game on 10th Jan postponed as well.

If this cold weather continues – and we’re not really used to prolonged cold spells any more – rearranged fixtures could cost us; they have before.

Woke up this morning to snow on the ground in Kirkcaldy. It was more or less gone by one o’clock, though.

I remark on this since, in all the twenty years I’ve lived in this house, there has been less than a handful of times – this morning included – snow has actually lain for any length of time. (Note, here, the past participle of to lie, and not of to lay.) Only once was there ever enough snow for my sons to build a snowman or go tobogganing in Beveridge Park – which is just over the railway line from our street.

Partly this is because we live reasonably close to the sea and the temperature is therefore always slightly higher than just a hundred metres or so inland and so we rarely get snow. It is noticeable that the snowline generally starts a bit up Oriel Road. Its higher elevation as well as more distance from the Promenade helps explain that.

In my youth in Dumbarton snow was also relatively unusual – it used to start where the Clyde narrowed at Old Kilpatrick and the warming effect of the river lessened.

This did not of course apply in the winter of 1962-3 which was famously severe and during which I actually stood on Loch Lomond. I believe this was itself not a patch on the winter of 1947, which was in addition made to seem worse by the austerity of those post-war years, my father told tales of folk burning old shoes as fuel – but I wasn’t around then.

Otherwise I do not recall snow falling, and lying, before New Year, except once.

It’s still November and a week to go before December, at least five before New Year. A harsh winter ahead? In August I noted an early onset of leaves going brown.

I remember reading somewhere in the early autumn that the weather patterns in Britain this summer resembled those of 1962 and that such patterns had a tendency to repeat themselves after gaps of years.

Just what we need! Credit crunch, banking collapse, the world financial system tottering around our ears and a possible harsh winter. (You read it here second.)

During a break at work yesterday I noticed the leaves on one of the trees outside were turning yellow.
It’s still August!
There were more trees like this on the way home, and even more today when I travelled to Perth and back.
I don’t remember trees turning so early before.
After a not very warm summer – the second in a row – maybe I was more sensitive to it but this was dispiriting.
Just goes to show the Scottish weather is totally bizarre.
Only two years ago I took in the delights of Gayfield (note to that American Christian website; it is not Homosexualfield) on the last Saturday of October to see Dumbarton achieve their now traditional draw there. And it was warm.
Before this I’d never been warm in Arbroath in my life!