6. On Blog Action Day

October 15th is International Blog Action Day where bloggers are asked to post about a topic worldwide - this year's topic is about climate change. View the details here. I thought I'd add my 5c worth (even though South African 5c isn't worth as much as US 5c).

I'm sure you've all heard somehow how climate change is going to affect us and how the earth can't sustain us if we continue with things the way they are (emissions etc etc) so I'm not going to harp upon that - I'm going to bring it down to a more personal level - i.e. how it affects ME.

Cape Town has a mediterranean climate meaning that it rains in the winter and we have hot dry summers. Well, usually anyway. In the last few years the winters have become longer with more bouts of flooding and the summers have become hotter with lots of fires - but it also rains now in summer which it never used to before. To make it worse, the summers are getting shorter. For a beach baby like me this is very bad news. Last time I looked it was impossible to get a tan when it's raining. (Oh and don't go on about skin cancer etc, I don't want to hear it. I also smoke. Get over it.)

What this means is that the climate is becoming tropical which is how it is in the regions to the north of Cape Town with wet rainy summers and dry winters that have warm days and freezing nights. Hardly beach conditions.

On a more serious note though, because the climate here is mediterranean, it's perfect wine country and the wine farmers are starting to see their grapes rot on the vine because of the rain in the summer - so a large economic impact is getting to be felt as a result. The simple solution to fix this would be to move the vineyards further south, but last time I looked it was pretty difficult to cultivate a vineyard in the sea - because there is no land further south than Cape Town so we have a problem.

In short, I want to appeal to Obama to look at climate change more seriously and do something about it because of this. He won a Nobel prize didn't he? He needs to address climate change so that 1. I can drink more wine and 2. I can go to the beach. Two very excellent reasons.

Soundtrack of the Day: This is the World We Live In - Genesis