Cricketing Heroes

I'd been listening to the Test Match all morning and feeling guilty about it so I went out and paid a meaningless pastoral visit on someone or other- just so I could say I'd done some work in the course of the day- and that's how I missed Ian Botham's legendary, match winning innings at the Headingley Ashes Test of 1981.

Yesterday I missed another match winning performance at Headingly in an Ashes Test. This time it was Ben Stokes who was waving the magic wand. England had made 67 in their first innings and Australia was cruising to a well-earned victory when Stokes who had played carefully and defensively the day before began to hit out. At least this time I wasn't taking tea with random parishioners but rushing round the garden with my great nieces- all of us armed with water pistols- which was even better fun than witnessing cricketing history being made.

Stokes is the new Botham- a buccaneering talent of a kind that comes along once every half century. Meanwhile Botham himself is still with us, appearing in TV ads for medical appliances. You sit in your armchair- like so- with your socks off and your feet on this vibrating plate thing and it makes you feel so much better...

Climate Science

Another very hot day. I gather records are being broken. In spite of there being no breeze to speak of the trees- some of them anyway- are quietly, unobtrusively, shedding leaves.

I've no doubt climate change is happening. However I belong to the school- one that's gathering strength- that says that what we're seeing is the brief period of warming that precedes a mini-ice age. I'm no scientist and all my information is taken on trust (apparently you need to examine the ice cores) so I've not been shouting about it. If you're going up against an orthodoxy it's advisable to have evidence to back one's opinion. The same applies if you're defending an orthodoxy- perhaps even more so- because orthodoxies usually turn out to be wrong.

"Settled science"? Pah. There's no such thing. The medievals thought their science was settled and along came Galileo. The Newtonians thought the same and along came Quantum Mechanics. The history of science is littered with examples of very clever people making very silly, soon to be falsified pronouncements- and all because of an over confidence which looks a lot like intellectual cowardice. The idea that any idea in any field of human knowledge is fixed for ever is essentially unscientific. The most we ever have are working hypotheses.