Balancing on the Edge

As the ground lies frozen, and fingers drum on the table, in a toasty kitchen, I'm very conscious that we're zooming in towards the Winter Solstice, timed for 1747 GMT today. And then the days will start to lengthen and they will be taken up in a flurry of activity. Though, there are still a few more days to leaf through those catalogues and plan.

But as I think about the solstice, and its mechanics, and all the green and blue on this planet, it is the product of some pretty fine tuning.

Because the earth is tilted at an angle of 23.45 degrees relative to the sun as it travels around it, you get differing amounts of exposure to the sun, so creating the seasons. And the reason for the solstice today.

Effectively, the Earth wobbles back-and-forth as it whirls around the Sun. Leaning over backwards to produce winter, so the Sun's rays glance off us leaving little warmth behind. And leaning forwards , thrusting its face into the sun to soak up all the Sun's warmth, to create summer.

But there's just enough of a difference to produce these brief December days, which we spend hiding in the kitchen, dreaming dreams of tomatoes, peas and what have you, and the long summer days that stretch tantalizingly before us.

Any more of a tilt and we could be looking at winters lasting years, and think of the amount of paraffin you'd need for your greenhouse.

But it does seem so finely balanced for us. Much farther away from the sun, regardless of the tilt and you wouldn't want any ice for your G&T, a bit nearer and we'd be applying factor 400 sun cream.

And all of the beauty on this earth, the plants, birds, animals, everything, that has come about because of this supreme balancing act may all disappear, as such subtlety seems to be beyond the ken of our political masters.

Call me an old cynical goat, but I doubted that all those bigwigs, politicians and spin meisters that descended on Copenhagen about a week ago would ever appreciate the situation about global warming. They didn't, and they can't, as it is beyond their short-term political needs. The only winners from the global warming conference would have been waiters, taxi drivers and prostitutes, all earning their whack in their own way.

Now is the time for us to step forward and show to these politicos that polluting gases have to be cut by 40% by 2020, just to stop world temperatures rising on average by 2 degrees centigrade. Again it's the subtle balance again, it doesn't sound a lot, just 2 little degrees, but that's what we need to keep the world roughly in balance.

Anything much further than that and the world will be beyond a tipping point, and things will get fairly difficult.

So as Johann Hari says in the Independent, we'll have to take the power into our own hands. Politicians seem to have little inclination to do anything concrete, as they cannot look at global warming as a global problem.