Saw the Kingfishers again yesterday, well to be more accurate they started to chee me loudly when I got close to their stretch of the river.
As I haven't seen them for a while, I'm guessing they do move further downstream or out towards the coast in winter, although it hasn't been that hard this year. With the changing climate, they may well be a species that benefits from a warmer winter, especially on the Scottish rivers.
I see that Britain is still behind on it's Kyoto targets, with the increase in coal electricity generation and in the Northern Hemisphere, January has been the warmest since records began more than 125 years ago. But are the two directly linked? The great debate rages on. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report last month finding global climate change to be "very likely" or at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface, this latest bit of data does not point the finger directly at us humans, but at a moderate El Niño feeding the global trend.
There is still the occassional (and now regarded as controversial) theory about, that suggests our recent climate change has been caused by natural influences and not us, by comparing data from Mars missions. Could there be something in this? There are undeniable natural trends to our planets weather, but you get the feeling pumping out do many greenhouse gasses aint going to help the situation one bit.
