Wettest

Day 183 #365DaysWild

One of the wettest Decembers on record? We await confirmation.

Rain again today. It is raining as I write. It is always raining.

Standing water in fields. Soils soaked. Roads fill with runoff as ditches and drains overtop. Rivers fill with eroded silt. Estuaries extend pans of mud further into the sea.

The British Isles are famously wet. 

In the floods of ‘48, the swollen Trent poured into the towns and villages along its course.

When the malevolent river again broke its banks in the early sixties, my cousin Simon and I explored our own Doggerland landscape of previously-unexplored lagoons and hills. Sloshing about. Rafts. An ingenious water depth-gauge created from a washed-up push chair we walked behind. Mud. Treasures. All without our parents knowledge. 

But now it feels different. Climate scientists have told us for many years that our warming seas are loading the air with excess water vapour. The water vapour hits land and is dumped as precipitation. Our warm winters deliver precipitation in the form of rain.

We’re now living through the reality of these predictions. 

With the trajectory making for even milder, wetter winters.

Presumably there’ll be winners. 

Overwintering water birds may benefit. Possibly

amphibians?

But we can take little pleasure in this if our lives are made more difficult, if more houses are disastrously flooded, sewage poured into watercourses and more lives tragically lost.

And yet, even in the face of such concrete evidence of the deleterious effects of our custodianship of this planet, our own government plans on another coal mine and licences for North Sea oil extraction? Even more Carbon released into the atmosphere.

The only course is to reduce the overloading of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. We must assert ourselves and insist that our leaders be brave for us, those who follow and for nature. They must take action.

Perhaps such concerns led to (another) disturbed night. Whatever it was I saw a scratch on my nose this morning. Then remembered my dream of last night in which I was desperately trying to remove a prosthetic nose.