What is your favourite type of weather?

Weather that won’t cost the earth is my favourite weather. I don’t pretend to understand all the science behind climate change. I can see with my eyes though that weather in Scotland is changing and can be inordinately hot. Different from the weather of my youth when one remembers that great July or fabulous May without the humidity one gets abroad.

This morning the BBC news led with a UN story on climate change. Warning that our planet is gaining more heat than it can expand, and that, this imbalance is worse now than at any time in recorded history. This news story was sandwiched in between reports of bombing and blowing up oil fields. Such irony. An article in the Guardian newspaper on the war in Iran makes grim reading for the climate. As the war in Iran alone is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.

I can remember in the late 1980s when carrying plastic bottles of water was considered fashionable in Scotland. I was incredulous and didn’t think it would last. Scotland is blessed with an abundance of fresh water and can even be drunk from the tap. It did last and from then on plastic seemed to grow. Taking a packed lunch and flask to work was laughed at. ‘Meal deals’ from supermarkets was `in’. More and more plastic became the norm.

At the start of the Millennium there was an excellent exhibition in my city highlighting what animals are already, or will be, extinct. And soon. It made a huge impression on me. It was so sad and yet you felt action was possible. There was hope.

So much messaging about climate change today is apocalyptic. One feels doomed, paralysed. Then the confusion multiplies with the powerlessness to stop the killing machine that is war.

Which reminds me yet again how Jesus knows what we face in this world:

“They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”

Matthew 23:4

Hope is essential to any environment. Okay so all that said what is my favourite weather? Dry with a crisp winter sun and cool breeze. Knowing that the next day in Scotland it will be raining cats and dogs. God willing that is.