Last weekend I was in the Manchester area visiting with Richard and Jacky, friends who I had made during my PhD years. We inevitably got onto the subject of global warming and Richard had a really good story to tell. I asked him to please write it up for me to post on my blog, and he has kindly done so. Here it is:

On a bleak day in the late Seventies I was sitting in an upper floor classroom of my old school. It was cold outside, with a blanket of snow on the ground, and there was a gusting wind that moaned and rattled at the windows. I was certainly glad of my grey-coloured school jumper that day, for I never felt overly warm in those exposed rooms in the upper parts of that block.

As if in response to the wintry conditions outside, the teacher of that particular class gave us a discourse on the subject of the previous Ice Age. There was some talk of mammoths and great glaciers, and of men dressed in furs crossing large areas that were seas frozen over and covered in ice. She also gave us some indication as to when the last Ice Age had been – namely, about ten thousand years ago – and went on to suggest the next one was due any time. Indeed, she even suggested the bitter winters of the last few years may represent the onset of this putative new Ice Age; with that statement came a warning we as children might have to get used to a world turning steadily colder during the course of our lives.

It was not a particularly cheering thought, as I trudged my way home through the snow that day, to consider our climate becoming harsher. Certainly, the teacher had been right about the winters of the early Seventies, I could appreciate that. Our town was set in the hills of the Pennines and I was quite used to seeing snow thick and heavy and lasting for weeks. Whilst great for the sledge, this was not so great for the school bus, which sometimes could not attempt the steep and meandering roads of my estate in such weather. The lingering snow could make life difficult in the vale; the bitter cold had its impact on the vulnerable and the elderly; services became disrupted; roads in and out of the valley were often rendered treacherous or closed.

But with the onset of the Eighties those hard winters I remember as a boy seemed to fade away; and as I progressed onwards through my education I never heard that impending Ice Age mentioned again. In fact, as the years have rolled by the very opposite thing has been much considered. From the Eighties until now the planet has gradually become warmer. There are various ways to go about explaining why this has happened; there are plenty of models and predictions concerned with where this warming might end, some with more spectacular results that others; and for sure in current times this issue is much tangled up in politics, money and the media spotlight. Is global warming natural or are we causing it? For all the noise and spin, this question is still to be satisfactorily answered.

Geological ages come in the context of thousands or millions of years. I am not yet forty, yet I have been around long enough to hear people talk quite seriously both of an impending Ice Age and now, more recently, of looming catastrophic events related to warming.

Richard Shaw, Hadfield