I have just returned home from weekend work in one of our small vineyards in Champagne to read that I can now be less careful with the linguistic way I have been treating the notion of global warmning so far.
The international climate summit in Paris ended friday. One statement of the network of researchers from countries all over the world - Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change - is, that there is only very little reason to believe that the global climate changes of the last 50 years could be natural. It is much more likely, that they are manmade, and the big sinner is the burning of fossil fuels. (Read more here.)
Skip the reservations
What is good enough for these experts within any reasonable probability is certainly good enough for me to skip the linguistic reservations I have had when describing weather anomalities until now. It simply seems that normal weather is no more what it used to be.
I don't know if you should categorize the ladybirds, that spent their sunday afternoon sunbathing on the stems of the vines as an anomality. I guess not though.
The small insects in their black-spotted red dresses hibernate in the cracks of the wood of the vines, and they usually emerge in early spring. In Denmark around the month of March. Since nature wakes up one month before in this region, it seems not completely out of step to meet them in February in Champagne.
Anyway, they'd better stay close to their cracks anyway. Today the sun may warm enough to give nice red chins after just an hour's work. But that does not imply that it is neither summer nor spring here. The wind blew icy and cold air all weekend, so we have worn both woollen bonnets and socks. And the temperature in the fields never passed six-seven degrees Celsius despite the pretty sunshine.
Green bias cuts
The tears - les pleurs - the sap, that literally run down the newly pruned branches, we have not seen.
Alain still thinks, that the surfaces of the cuts are rather green. That the sap is not as completely gone, as it should and as it is normally. I don't have the necessary experience to estimate if it is greener than usual. But that the bias surfaces are juicy green rather than more yellow and dry is obvious.
Again, if this green colour is connected with the unusually warm months we have had the last quarter or not, I also don't feel qualified to have my say about.
But the warming that researchers now consider manmade as a fact, will continue this way the next hundreds of years, they foresee.
På dansk
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Read more perspectives at CNN.com, at International Herald Tribune or at the BBC.
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