Sun block

What is the Met Office doing issuing an "Extreme Heat" warning today? North Staffordshire was max. 80 degrees today. That's just a normal summer, or it is in those happy years when England actually gets a summer. We don't need yet another dribble of daily alarmism. Thanks goodness I grew up at a time when we lived without constant nannying and scolding and 'soft' hysteria. My advice is to get the relevant addons and filters for your web browser, and learn how to block most of it out. It's not that difficult to select and block individual bits of a Web page, or to block items with certain phrases.

The pong is gone, for now

The "great pong" seems to be gone, or at least gone from Stoke-on-Trent. For those who have not experienced it, a 'bad eggs' smell has been periodically wafting down into and through the Stoke valley since about the end of last summer. It was very bad by the end of January, and returned briefly and in a much lesser form at the start of March.

Perhaps it's the general lack of rain that's caused the pong to go 'poof' and vanish, but I haven't sniffed anything untoward for about five or six weeks now. Doubtless the month of May will see the rain returning, though, and May Day Bank Holiday has a fearsome reputation for being a windy washout. So we'll have to see what happens after a few good downpours.

Walleys Quarry landfill in Silverdale is blamed, but they say they have proof that the ultimate cause is off-site. Regardless of where it's coming from it can't be very pleasant for those living on the lip of the dump or trying to sell their houses there. All I can say that central Stoke-on-Trent appears to be no longer affected, at least until the next heavy rain comes.

Where will they put the West Midlands National Park?

In the news today: "Plans for West Midlands National Park move forward".

So where exactly would they put it, if it was to be something real and big. Not just a patchwork PR exercise that aimed to provoke no NIMBY-ism from voters? If it's indeed to be big and green, then I guess it would have to be near Birmingham, for political reasons. And be positioned so it at least has a chance of an eventual genuine connection with the National Forest, in perhaps 50 years.

Looking at the map, I'd then guess that a starting point would be adding 'wild-belt' hedged strips and that try to link up the natural areas between Sutton Park and Cannock Chase. Such that after 20 years a squirrel could (just about) leap from tree-to-tree from Sutton Coldfield up to Stafford.

Such wide thick-hedged wildife strips would be very-low cost, if they were for nature only, and were not hijacked by local councils to be public paths used by cyclists, dog-walkers, etc. All one would need would be to buy the strips of relatively low-value land, then add some stakes and wire and hedge it either side of the strip. The strip would be wide enough to be easily mown for wild-flower meadow, and would go more or less in a bee-line. After a decade, get in some lads with hedge-laying tools. Maybe also make some ponds at the connector-points, and at a distance around those plant clumps of what will eventually become large mature trees. All just for nature, no public access to the connector strips, only to what they're connecting.

Free Saplings

The Woodland Trust has Free Trees for Schools and Communities. All the trees are "sourced and grown in the UK and Ireland", and they come in matched variety packs matched to specific situations. You've now missed their "delivery in March 2020" deadline, but:

"Applications will be live again on 6th January 2020 for saplings to be delivered in November 2020, so keep your eyes peeled and get in quick."

Clearwaste

This looks useful. A new British app that makes it easy to... 1) report fly-tipping and dumping, and 2) get the best quote for removal, from a proper licensed Waste Carrier.

A new 'Garden Town' north of Stafford.

A new 'garden town' has been announced: "Meecebrook, in the north of Stafford borough - about 10,000 homes".

What's a 'garden town', then? Sometimes also called an 'eco-town'. It's all rather nebulous, but the best I can figure is this.

Properly planned, from the ground up, to:

* fit naturally into the existing natural environment.
* add enhancements to the existing natural environment.

* learns all the lessons from the past British 'garden cities' and new settlements such as Bournville, Poundbury etc.
* designed for the real British weather, not some architect's 'flat-roof and pastel stucco' blue-skies modernist/postmodernist Mediterranean fantasyland.

* high-quality housing, with an eye for beauty and design.
* homes that don't all look the same.
* proper shops with proper frontages.
* use of local / natural building materials.
* meaningful public art.
* widely employs craft-based apprentices during the building.

* cars discouraged.
* locally accessible jobs, via cycling and walking.
* 'work from home' over superfast Internet.
* local supply of the workers needed to manage the abundant gardens, parks, open spaces.

* allotments.
* community centres, local shops and doctors.
* good local schools and home-schooling facilities.
* community networks, autonomous groups, has a volunteering culture.
* robust ongoing control of noise, dogs, litter and other annoyances.

* community ownership of the land.
* the town is locally led, once up and running.
* ongoing control of ugliness and tackiness re: shop fronts, hoardings, signage.

* wider green belt protection.
* local heritage assets protection in the surrounding district.

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In terms of local materials, it would be great to see extensive use of hard-wearing tiles and other ceramics from Stoke-on-Trent.

Leaf it out! - leaf blower bans

Bans on leaf blowers are coming into force in places across the USA, as America nudges out of a deep winter and toward another summer. Most notably bans in many parts of California and across Washington.

Let's hope this spreads, and to the UK. I'm usually not one for having the state ban things, but anything that reduces the growing amounts of annoying noise in a suburban summer must be good. Such blowers and strimmers are also old, usually highly inefficient two-stroke petrol engine technology, and are unhealthy in all sorts of ways for those using them. Not least in terms of hearing damage. Many blowers and strimmers are said to get up to 80-100 decibels.

I can't imagine that the local sensitive-eared pet population or wildlife finds them a welcome addition to the landscape, either.

Some places are going even further and banning all noisy landscaping and cutting tools in summer, expecting contractors and gardeners to switch to battery-power or hand-tools or a mix of both. Should Stoke follow their lead?

Bags of trees

The Tree Council has a Community Tree Fund 2018 open to both formal and ad hoc community groups. Up to £700, to plant native trees during National Tree Week in late 2018. Apply by 31st March 2018!

Trentham Park oak, by Quimby.

'Seeing the wood for the trees...'

From the Yale School of Forestry Yale Environment 360 magazine...

"the American Forest and Paper Association, a trade association, concluded that most wood pellets produced in the U.S., both for domestic burning and for export to the U.K., were prepared from whole trees." (Dec 2017)

So the wood pellets that power our power stations are not quite made from the off-cuts and waste bits of timber that we'd been told about. It appears that "most" comes from whole and healthy hardwood trees, felled and shipped half way across the world to be burned for so-called 'green energy'. And don't forget that the UK domestic electricity bill payer is paying on average about £149 more on their bills each year, in order to fund the 'green subsidies' that pay for such mad schemes. This subsidy is expected to treble in cost to the domestic bill payer, over the next five years.

"Bee off with you..."

Urban beekeeping is harming wild bees, says Cambridge University. The bees in trendy urban hives out-compete local wild bees for food, and also pass on diseases to them.

On the plant-growing season in UK

In The Guardian today is an article titled "Plant-growing season in UK now a month longer than in 1990". Earlier springtimes are said to be responsible for the overwhelming part of the extension. So, it looks like good news for gardeners.

True, but it's also very very old news in terms of science. Scientists have been tracking the increase in England since 1980...

(Source: Thermal growing season in central England.)

Scotland shows much the same upward curve. Though there it appears to have started more gradually, and twenty years earlier in 1960. Possibly the difference is partly also due to their lesser urban heat-islands, and less light-pollution at night...

(Source: An online handbook of climate trends across Scotland)

Temperature rises in Scotland have been nudging an overall 0.7°C compared to 30 years ago, which is significant but also well within the envelope of natural decadal variability.

Another less debatable factor there is that the UK's slight overall increase in rainfall is happening almost entirely in Scotland. True, Wales now has 10% more rain than 30 years ago, but there's so much of there that I doubt anyone's noticed. While here in England there's been almost no perceptible change since 1910. Nor is it getting rainier in summer downpours. Let's take Oxfordshire as a proxy for the Midlands counties, for instance, as it has excellent long-term rain records. Its average rainfall per rain-day between April and September varies very little from year to year.

But back to the Midlands as a whole. We shouldn't go taking today's 'Guardian news' literally and merrily planting our potatoes in mid-February. Take a look at the savage ups-and-downs of the actual recorded growing season lengths on those graphs, rather than at the computer-smoothed statistical trend line. Those jaggies reflect what gardeners know all too well, living on an island so sensitive to the warmth-giving powers of the North Atlantic Drift (aka 'The Gulf Stream'). We know that an essentially random tweak of an Atlantic ocean current, or a twist in a vortex of Arctic winds, can often decide the arrival date of spring in any given year. As H.W. Linderholm concluded, after surveying all the scientific literature on the topic to 2005...

"... several authors have found strong associations between large scale weather phenomena (e.g. the NAO [North Atlantic Oscillation]) and growing season variability, suggesting that global warming may not be the only explanation. Also, other factors like land use change may have been of importance. It must be kept in mind that the observed changes in GSL [growing season length] are not uniform; while increased GSL has been observed in low-to-mid latitudes, the GSL seems to decrease at some high latitude and altitude sites." ("Growing Season Changes in the Last Century", Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, March 2006).

The variability appears to arise almost entirely from the tension between two mega-forces out in the Atlantic. The North Atlantic Oscillation dominates us until February, and then the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation takes over in March/April. Usually.

Some things appear to have changed, it's true. On a 50-year decadal basis there are now less days with air frost. There are now 14 less days measured with air frost in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, than there were in the 1970s. To the east of us there are more sunny days, with East Anglia now getting 10% more sunny days. Possibly the two things are connected, and down to a long-term vortex tweak. More clouds over Derbyshire and Staffordshire = less frost. Less clouds over East Anglia = more sunny days there. Or it could just be that the 50-year trend-line has been skewed by starting it with the bitter winters of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

How does all this affect the local wildlife? Well, our hardy British wildlife has evolved to be highly adaptable to the variable timing of the arrival of spring. Pollinators and flora are likewise adapted to such variations. It thus seems unlikely that such natural variability will phase our wildlife, especially given how long it's been happening — the graph above shows it happening long before the Industrial Revolution. In our own time, a few extra years (per decade) in which there's an earlier arrival of a warm spring, and/or an extended Indian summer in Autumn, would seem to me to benefit almost all species.

Much the same can be said of the apparent trend toward very slightly wetter and slightly milder winters in England, as that's also broadly beneficial since it prevents drought (at the cost of a little localised temporary flooding, though a lot of that is down to cafe grease and wet-wipe blocked drains). According to the peer-reviewed papers, the rainier winters are due to natural multi-decadal variability that has been going up and down — with no significant trend-pattern — for the last 150 years. It's in a 'see-saw' pattern, if you like. We're currently in a decade-long wet patch of winters, after a run of dry years when there were alarmist headlines that the UK was now living in "permanent drought" or that "we are no longer a rainy country". But we'll come out of it and dry off again, as any meteorologist should well know. Like the growing-season shifts, such rolling multi-year shifts from wet to dry seem to be due to essentially random tweaks of a huge Atlantic ocean current, which then does or doesn't funnel winter storms toward the British Isles.