New Year's Eve

Night, and the blue moon full; half the world in the new year and half of us still in the old. Snow tumbling softly through the street light outside, settling in a coarse white patina. Candles, food and wine, a company of friends gathering here from nearabouts bringing music and sweets.

A year ago we were newly returned, sitting amongst boxes and rediscovered books.

Christmas Eve 2009

Snow pix

The white frosting continues today; another six inches of snow fell at tea time and the place looks more Narnian by the hour.

Unsettling

Still chill

Snow continues to fall; snow on snow.

The practical upshot of this is that the first fall of snow settles and packs down, like the flour in the bottom of the sack, under its own weight or trodden down by small boys/Christmas revellers/car scrapers. It melts very slightly in the degree or so of warmth afforded by the midday sun and at night this millimetre of water freezes to a near frictionless surface of ice.

New snow overlays this miracle of physics with an impossibly beautiful covering of crisp yet powdery sugar frosting like a white sahara. "Treacherous" doesn't come near to describing this combination of awesome beauty and lethal potential. Broken bones and smashed cars abound, as do snowmen.

Simon and I spent the afternoon building ours and he's proof that those hours of reading Calvin and Hobbes were not wasted. He is a jolly, seasonal but strangely disturbing presence in the garden with his mushroom dark glasses and sharp sticks hair. A triumph.

Chill

Today Simon and I were walking back from town across the bridge when a breath of freezing air descended. The sky turned that colour of grey that heralds snow, and it began to sleet. All this happened in the space of 30 seconds, like it does on those weather maps. Shoulders hunched we hurried on, and half-way up the long hill to the house we stopped and looked as a wall of snowflakes swept down the street and turned all to a whiteout.

There's now several inches of snow lying like sugar on every surface; cars turned to soft white mounds, trees drooping with heaped powder and slender icicles. I watched two squirrels bounding through the deep snow on the lawn across to the bird table, ascend opposite sides of it and chomp into the seed I'd laid there. A moment later one of them went flying off the platform and landed in the snow, kicked superbly by the other. A tussle ensued with first one then the other being booted from the food shelf. A victor emerged and the other went off to tackle the squirrel-proof peanut holder.

It's now nearly midnight and minus 10 outside, according to the car's temperature reading. Could be a white Christmas at this rate.

More flooding photos

The River Tweed in spate.

You can click on any of these photos to get a full-size view.

Scroll down for more.

Peebles floods

Peebles caught the edge of the recent flooding. These were taken on the day the river broke its banks.

All is pervaded with the smell of turpentine

The news wires are alive this week with a shocking story of deceit, misinformation and deliberate falsification of data in the ongoing debate about climate change.

In an interesting coincidence with the upcoming summit in Copenhagen some e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia have been 'leaked' and a press story generated around their contents. The e-mails selected out for publication centre around a cover-page graph of mean temperatures derived from data from tree surveys. The depiction of the data from the period 1960 onwards was apparently adjusted to account for an anomaly wherein the mean temperature appears to fall from that year onwards. The fall in temperature didn't actually happen according to other temperature data and is a statistical anomaly related to how the tree data was collected. The adjustment produced a graph depicting a continuing rise, reflecting the actual temperature data more accurately and removing the need for an explanatory paragraph on the front cover.

Climate scientists should know better than to make adjustments to such a politically sensitive set of data, however mediocre its content, well intentioned their actions or passionate their zeal. The subsequent stories about conspiracies and hidden agendas have been predictable.

A series of triumphal press releases by sceptical scientists - most of them not climate scientists - and the Saudi Arabian government, have rewritten the substance of this correspondence as a conspiracy rivalling the Moon landing, Kennedy and Diana all rolled into one. A redrawn graph has become, through careful selection of e-mails from an eleven-year correspondence, a deftly planned and audaciously executed defrauding of the public by climate scientists; a re-framing of a completely natural process of global warming and cooling into a man-made phenomenon.

Shock jocks and newspapers of a particular hue have exulted. Lurid headlines have gushed like light sweet crude and the hills are alive with the sound of baying hounds. Few of the stories I've read have made any mention of the actual contents of the e-mail messages, concentrating instead on gripping headline statements about deceit, conspiracy, fraud, manipulation, secrets and lies. Misinformation abounds. The facts are far less interesting.

Thus far there's been little speculation about the agenda of these evil climate scientists who have apparently been hoodwinking us all these years. What's in it for them ? Who's paying them ? There's not much money in windmills, and research grants hardly justify such a massive collusion and lengthy creative accounting effort.

Watergate taught us to follow the money, but the trail emanating from the global warming conspiracy theory doesn't seem to go anywhere. What about the trail leading from the sceptical camp ? Well, the charge on Copenhagen is being lead by the Saudi Arabian government. Ah....