1911 – “Global Weirding” Then and Now

Last week I read a couple of rather dramatic articles about recent weather events (hat tip to Jeremy who runs the Make Wealth History website – he’s not an AGW sceptic but publishes much that is of interest to believers and sceptics alike.)

The first is this rather scary piece by John Vidal of the Guardian – Warning: extreme weather ahead.

Drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales, yet Scotland has just registered its wettest-ever May. The warmest British spring in 100 years followed one of the coldest UK winters in 300 years. June in London has been colder than March. February was warm enough to strip on Snowdon, but last Saturday it snowed there.

Welcome to the climate rollercoaster, or what is being coined the “new normal” of weather. What was, until quite recently, predictable, temperate, mild and equable British weather, guaranteed to be warmish and wettish, ensuring green lawns in August, now sees the seasons reversed and temperature and rainfall records broken almost every year. When Kent receives as much rain (4mm) in May as Timbuktu, Manchester has more sunshine than Marbella, and soils in southern England are drier than those in Egypt, something is happening.

And so it goes. Droughts, mega heat waves, floods, tornadoes, the signs are all there. Something is happening. And while no scientist can point to an individual weather event and blame man-made climate change, “many argue that these phenomena are textbook examples of the kind of impact that can be expected in a warming world.”

The second article is an op-ed in the Washington Post by climate campaigner Bill McKibben, entitled A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

And so it goes. When Bill says don’t make connections between these extreme weather events, of course, he’s being ironical, in a rather heavy-handed way, and meaning do please make connections between these tornado outbreaks and that it is vitally important to go ahead and link the lot of them (and much more besides) to man-made climate change.

On reading these and similar articles (and, for my sins, I’ve read plenty of them over recent years), it is difficult to avoid the impression that the climate system of planet Earth is falling apart at the seams, like a person on the edge of some sort of devastating nervous and physical breakdown. At this point, one might be forgiven for wondering how many months this can all continue, before the entire world spirals into an insane, chaotic, flood-drenched, drought-scorched, tornado-battered, lightning-blasted, freezing, blazing, melting, belching, squelching inferno of total and utter weather-related doom, which will threaten to make the scariest of Roland Emmerich’s disaster movies seem like the most sedate and uneventful of teddy bears’ picnics by comparison.

With these articles in mind, what sort of typical year might we expect to have in future? What kinds of extreme weather events and accompanying humanitarian disasters can we anticipate, once out-of-control “global weirding” has tightened its grip?

Perhaps the following scenario can give us a few hints.

- In March, tropical cyclones devastate coastal towns in Queensland, Australia, and sink a large passenger ship with all hands.

- At the end of May, a violent thunderstorm creates havoc in southern England, killing 17 people.

- Over the summer, the river Yangtze in China floods, causing an estimated 100,000 deaths, creating a vast lake, 80 miles long and 35 miles wide, and also creating 3.7 million “climate refugees”.

- July brings a crippling 11-day heat wave in the north-eastern US, causing almost 150 deaths in New York City alone and setting temperature records in some places that will stand for a century.

- Also in July, the Philippines endure record rainfall, with 46 inches falling in Baguio City over 24 hours, during a super typhoon.

- In England there is a summer heat wave, with temperature records broken in the east of England and in Epsom, milk shortages due to parched conditions, farming coming to a complete standstill in some parts, food rotting on the London docks and also the threat of civil unrest.

- In Ontario, Canada, an early spring and an abnormally dry summer leads to one of the most devastating forest fires ever recorded there.

- In August, an Atlantic hurricane causes great damage in Charleston, reducing houses and ships to matchwood and taking 17 lives.

- In southern Angola, this year marks the start of a period of almost unbelievable hardship, in which a total of 250,000 people will die from drought, famine, disease and forced labour.

- In Australia, some regions are at their driest for the entire century, with the start of a major period of drought, punctuated by one of the heaviest downpours ever recorded in Western Queensland.

- In November, there is a remarkable weather anomaly in the American mid-west, with many cities, such as Oklahoma City, recording record high temperatures and record lows all on the same day, and with blizzards, a dust storm and outbreaks of tornadoes thrown in.

A picture of things to come?

Actually, this was the year 1911, exactly a century ago.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that for many writers in the climate debate, history seems to have begun sometime in the late 1970s, with everything before that in a kind of climate limbo. But “global weirding” has always been with us! And 1911 wasn’t even particularly unusual, disaster-wise – the only reason I’m singling it out is that it was precisely 100 years ago. The “new normal” of weather extremes is actually not very new at all.

If the idea of dangerous man-made global warming had been prevalent at the time, what sort of newspaper articles the Edwardian counterparts of John Vidal and Bill McKibben would have written, I wonder?

And how many months or years might they have given the world, before things got even worse?

New Year Fortean Fiesta of the Macabre

If you have been cut off from the outside world for the last 10 days or so – still buried under a snowdrift in some remote isolated hamlet, perhaps – you may not have realised that the turn of the year marked the beginning of a remarkable flurry of bizarre news stories relating to mass animal deaths.

Here are some of them, roughly in chronological order:

30th December: Brazil – about 100 tons of dead fish (sardines, croaker and catfish) wash up along the coast of Parana. 31st December: USA – about 100,000 fish, mostly drum, are found dead along the Arkansas River. 1st January: USA: 2,000 – 5,000 red-winged blackbirds crash out of the sky over the small town of Beebe, Arkansas. 3rd January: USA – 500 assorted birds fall from the skies onto a highway in Louisiana (and similar events occur in Kentucky and Texas). About 2 million spot fish are found dead in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. UK – about 40,000 velvet swimming (or “devil”) crabs are discovered dead on beaches in Kent. 4th January: Sweden – 50-100 jackdaws turn up dead in Falkoping, Sweden. New Zealand – hundreds of dead snapper fish litter beaches at Coromandel. 5th January: Italy – thousands of turtle doves are found dead with strangely blue-stained beaks in the town of Faenza, Italy.

Dates and numbers are approximate, and I’m sure the list is incomplete. Today is only 11th January, after all, so it’s very possible this “flap” has yet to run its course.

What caused these events? Discounting aliens, HAARP or God, explanations vary. The Arkansas blackbirds and other avian casualties might have been startled by fireworks and crashed to earth in their panic (causing the blunt-force trauma that killed them.) The fish and crabs could have been wiped out by toxins, disease or by unusually low temperatures. There is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all explanation, and for some of these cases there may be no obvious conclusion to be had.

Which is fair enough. We know little enough about how creatures like birds and fish navigate, let alone why they sometimes appear to fail so spectacularly. There are still mysteries aplenty in nature, such as why pilot whales beach themselves, what causes ball lightning and why fish and frogs occasionally rain down from the heavens (see my blog from March last year.) And that’s a good thing; think how dull it will be once every last little conundrum has been unwrapped and dissected.

What interests me most is the human factor. Because events such as the Arkansas blackbird massacre have been happening for centuries; Charles Fort was collecting these stories when human impact on the environment was far smaller than it is now, and when man-made electromagnetic radiation (which I’ve seen mooted as a possible cause) was minimal. It appears likely to me that this recent episode of apparently linked mass deaths could in part be an artefact of modern communications. Never before have we had such a responsive global media machine as we do now – instantly and constantly reporting, repeating, collating, comparing, recalling and analysing everything that happens. A striking event occurs – and immediately flocks of similar events are brought to our attention by the machine. What would otherwise be dismissed as mere happenstance thus becomes a pattern, and a report of dead animals on a lonely beach somewhere, that would have been less noticeable had it occurred six months ago, now becomes eerily prominent.

Just like our extended minds and senses that make up the modern media, we humans as individuals are also prone to recognise patterns and reach conclusions on sometimes very little evidence indeed. People often appear to be acting out from some kind of internal script rather than attempting to get to some sort of objective truth (and I’m probably no exception.)

Take, for example, the comments (272 of them, to date) written about an article that appeared on the Huffington Post website a few days ago, about the animal deaths. Most are relatively rational, but here are a few that are somewhat less clear-headed (except for the one right at the end!):

“Perhaps the innocent are dying young..and leaving those of us guilty of destroying our mother earth here to deal with the consequences…”

“Stop telling yourself that everything is just fine and look at what is happening!!!!”

“We really have to stop distorting this planet…”

“I feel like maybe we should all be panicking.”

“…let’s wait before running out in the street with our hair on fire. It is not like we can stop it whatever it is, so panicking will not help.”

(Well said, that last person.)

A final thought. Commenting on the 40,000 dead crabs washed up on the beaches of Kent (reported here in the Daily Mail), coastal warden Tony Sykes opined that the crabs had been killed by hypothermia caused by a sudden temperature drop, but only after possibly being lured towards the shoreline by “climate change and warmer weather”.

Global warming – as the ultimate cause of most things that are thought to be going wrong in nature – is truly an idea more difficult to kill off than a beachload of devil crabs.

UPDATE

Rummaging around on the internet reveals more great comments, some of which might be tongue-in-cheek:

“Is the World about to End? Is the Earth warning us?”

“Somebody has developed a species-specific weapon. It targets specific DNA and kills only those living creatures which possess it. It is presently being tested, or we are being warned. The Chinese? Have they found a solution to their overpopulation, to wipe out every human DNA but their own?”

“I bet the scientists know something we don’t, and dare not say what is happening in case it causes panic.”

“It scares me. No one I’ve talked to have ever heard of these things happening except when dolphans & whales beach them selves. Somebody has to know somebody. Looking at the map, we look targeted. We live 5 hrs from Santa Rosa, CA USA.”

“Bad signs. If men are so cruel to the environment and earth. We will get what we deserve.”

“Its stupidity. Most of todays ills are caused by overpopulation, yet, idiots believe a few rich guys want to killl everyone. Floods, earthquakes, volcano’s, tornados, hurricanes and more will all increase as our population size grows. Until we balance with nature, be prepared for food shortages, drought, severe heat AND cold spells, new diseases and more. We were warned over the last 50 years to wake up and NO ONE wants to listen. Everything’s a conspiracy. Hows that view workin out for ya?”

Quite.

And I see that there’s a Google map now for mass animal deaths, which captures some of them but has not been updated in recent days, and which does seem to tie in with my notion that this is partly a mass-media phenomenon. Lots of good comments here too!

The Sleep of Reason

The Northern Hemisphere continues its journey towards winter and the year’s end. Today is Halloween, and the clocks have just gone back an hour here in Britain, heralding slightly brighter mornings than of late, but also deeper, darker evenings.

However, I rather like the cold days and dark evenings, as I’m of a slightly antisocial disposition, and it keeps people generally in their boxes, indoors with the windows shut. There’s less noise – apart from the infernal fireworks of course. But after next weekend, they too will begin to fall silent, thank goodness, giving way to some blessed peace, quiet, darkness and silence.

Now I’ve said all that, back to climate matters. No, not my “100 Years of Climate Change” series, which has sadly fallen by the wayside and will have to be salvaged in one or more catch-up posts before the end of the year (if I bother). This is about the psychology of climate change.

Something I’ve noticed over the last year or so especially is that just as public opinion has started to go against the great war on carbon dioxide, legions of psychologists have been drafted in to turn back the tide and get us all on message again. That may not be strictly correct, on second thoughts, as they seem to be volunteering themselves rather than being actively recruited.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing I’m writing about – a conference called “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” that was held at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London on the weekend of 16th and 17th October. It is described thus:

“How does our knowledge of climate change affect our sense of identity? What might underlie issues of connection with, and disconnection from, the natural world? How do we understand the denial of climate change?

Speakers from the field of psychoanalysis explored these and other questions with scientists, environmentalists, writers, educationalists and policy makers. The conference aimed to achieve a better understanding through interdisciplinary exchange.”

Talks included “Great Expectations: some psychic consequences of the discovery of personal ecological debt”, “Unconscious obstacles to caring for the planet” and “Climate change denial in a perverse culture”. Speakers included Dr Rosemary Randall, who writes and lectures on psychological approaches to the problem of climate change, Dr Renee Lertzman, who is concerned with the relations of psychoanalytic research and theory with contemporary environmental crises, and Mrs Sally Weintrobe, whose most most recent paper was on “runaway greed and climate change denial.”

(I recognise myself totally in that last bit, as I pig out on Halloween chocolates – no trick-or-treaters this year, what a shame – and scoff at catastrophic global warming. Runaway greed and climate change denial – c’est moi!)

Andrew C Revkin of the New York Times blogged about it last Thursday, and posted a report about the event from attendee Dr Lertzman, who explains her concept of the “myth of apathy”, which as far as I can make out, explores the idea that while people generally appear not to care about climate change, they actually do, but are finding it difficult to express that care, as it is involves facing up to scary feelings of loss.

Anyway, you can read the rest of it here, and highly fascinating it is too. My theory about this matter is a lot simpler than Dr Lertzman’s as it involves the recognition that most people actually do not care about climate change. They care about the environment, which is a different thing entirely – clean air, clean water, conserving nature, preventing pandas and tigers from going extinct. But after having been told for so long that sea levels are rising dangerously and we could all be under water before too long, it cannot have escaped many people’s attention that when they visit Victorian seaside resorts, they can find local features that were just above high tide 150 years ago and which are still just above high tide now. Or that there are plenty of other signs that climate change catastrophe is stubbornly persisting in its failure to materialise.

Here’s a comment I left on the Dot Earth blog:

“This is highly interesting, but what I really want to know is why there has not, to my knowledge, been much (or any?) psychological research into the elements of guilt, angst, aggression and self-loathing that have been, to some extent, part and parcel of Western environmentalism from the days of Paul Ehrlich’s gloomy predictions of overpopulation and resource depletion in the 1970s through to the catastrophic global warming scare that seems to have peaked in the last 3 or 4 years, and through to the next great alarm (the signs are that it could well be biodiversity.) It would indeed appear to be a fertile ground for researchers and I’m curious as to whether any work has been done in this area.

If psychologists are generally avoiding that subject and instead casting the spotlight of their attention on the topics covered above (loss, mourning, denial, resistance to change, etc.) while accepting without question as “givens” the reality of impending catastrophe, the mental illness – for that is what they are discussing – of the majority of us who are unconvinced that there is an impending catastrophe, and the need to make us compliant, that is highly interesting too.

And if it there was some actual investigation into the matter and it turned out – as I believe is the case – that we, the unconvinced majority, are in fact not unconsciously terrified, in denial of our anxieties, etc., but are on the whole mentally healthy, robust, rational, optimistic and generally confident, what then for the environmental movement? Also – what then for the politicians and bureaucrats whose careers have thrived in this climate of fear and for the mental health professionals they have enlisted to bring us into line?”

For this is what intrigues me. Why are psychologists apparently not interested in the sort of end-times, doomsday terrors of the catastrophic climate change proponents, Malthusians, Peak-Oilers and similar scare merchants? Why are they, almost as one, turning their attention on us, the unconvinced majority, with a view to getting us to support drastic CO2 mitigation policies, not through our taxes and energy bills (we’re already doing that) but with our thoughts and feelings? Why exactly is this so important to them?

I don’t have a ready answer, but hope to explore this subject in many blogs to come.

I’ll leave you with a seasonal message from Dr Steven Moffic, a psychiatrist at the Medical College of Wisconsin (watch – if you dare! – the entire video here.)

“… instead of using psychiatric techniques to reduce excessive anxiety, shame and guilt, for global warming these emotions will need to be increased in the unconcerned. This kind of help runs counter to our usual goal of not making people feel worse. But remember that at times we need to make our patients more anxious or guilty, when we want them to be more compliant.”

Happy Halloween!

The Cargo of the Altavia

This story caught my attention last week. On Wednesday 14th July, the Liberia-registered cargo ship M.V.Altavia docked at the Pacific island of Guam, carrying building materials (insulation and beams, we’re told) from South Korea for use in a massive new project to house construction workers at the village of Dededo.

But that was not all that it carried. As soon as the items began to be unloaded, huge numbers of spiders were reported to have been sighted, both on the cargo and in the ship itself – hundreds of large ones with bodies the size of a quarter (which is 24.26 millimetres in diameter, according to Wikipedia) and thousands of smaller ones.

The unloading was stopped at once, and the ship forced to move off to a quarantine anchorage, further out into Apra Harbor, while a few of the spiders were analysed by the Department of Agriculture lab. Once it was established that the spiders were not native to Guam, and that they were simply too numerous on the ship for fumigation to be a success, the M.V. Altavia was turned away and forced to return to Korea. A second cargo ship, the M.V. STX Alpha, also containing construction materials and also sailing from South Korea to Guam, was then told to turn back, even before it had reached its destination.

I’m interested in this story for several reasons.

Firstly, when I was in Japan last December, one of the major and long-running news stories was the dispute and negotiations between Japan and the US over the American airbase in Okinawa, which has been the cause of much local friction over the years. The upshot of all that has been the planned withdrawal of 8,000 US Marines from Okinawa, which will lead to Guam increasing in importance as a major hub for the American military in the western Pacific (the airbase stays on Okinawa, though, but will be moved from the city to the coast.) Hence the plans for marshalling an 18,000-strong army of construction workers on the island, and hence the need for accommodation for said workers – the Ukudu Workforce Village, which is basically a temporary housing project of giant proportions.

The language in the original report (Pacific Daily News) is also worthy of note, as other internet commentators have already mentioned, as it includes the word “stevedores”, which has a sort of lovely old-world, age-of-sail ring to it. I’m imagining a crew of tobacco-chewing roughnecks on the docks at Guam, hauling on ropes and manhandling crates – only to leap back with many a startled oath as the cargo began to disgorge hordes of spidery invaders. Which was probably nothing like the real situation at all, as I’m sure all that sort of work could be done by a handful of blokes in hard hats, sitting at the controls of machines. I rather like my version, however.

Of course, I’m also interested in the spiders. What species do these belong to? For a moment, when I was first aware of the case, I wondered whether these might even be of a previously undiscovered kind, but on second thoughts this would be very unlikely (although to date, there doesn’t seem to be any confirmation yet of what exactly these interlopers are) and they’re possibly of a type that is native to Korea. (By the way, I was reminded somehow of John Wyndham’s posthumously published novella Web, and have been prompted finally to write a review of that rather curious work, which you can now find on my Planet Bookworm site.)

And what of the crew? What, one wonders, did they make of that situation – alone (as it were) on the high seas on a ship overrun by eight-legged horrors? Can you imagine having to venture down into the darkness of the hold to inspect the cargo, armed only with a flashlight (the one with the dodgy batteries, naturally)? Being moderately arachnophobic myself, I would have been inclined to start sending frantic and incoherent mayday signals as soon as the full predicament was known, and would have been sorely tempted to jump ship at Guam, despite the threat of prison.

Or cast myself adrift in a lifeboat perhaps, mid-voyage, if driven to the edge of uncontrollable gibbering madness. But the nightmare might not have ended there, oh no. Overcome with hunger, I might have opened my container of emergency rations at last, only to find – guess what.

UPDATE

As of the Friday before last, an entomologist at the University of Guam, Dr Aubrey Moore (with the help of Dr. Seung Tae Kim, who is an arachnologist at the Seoul National University) has apparently identified two separate kinds of spider, from the samples. Both are orb weavers, one large, the other small; both are common to Korea and both are harmless to humans. Orb weavers I’ve seen in Japan, and yes – they can get pretty large. Apparently, spiders are very plentiful on Guam, due to the abundance of insects and the lack of birds. So maybe it isn’t the sort of place where an arachnophobe would be advised to jump ship; a case of out of the frying pan…

Truly Weird Weather

A long time ago, back in the mists of childhood, I once had a jigsaw puzzle that I was literally unable to finish. Not that there was anything wrong with the puzzle – missing pieces, or such. It was literally impossible to complete. When fully assembled, it formed a sort of horizontal scene or frieze depicting zoo animals (here my memory is a little fuzzy) where the extreme right-hand side of the picture wrapped around to the left-hand side, so to speak. The upshot was that you could add the final puzzle pieces to one side or the other, but there would always be several holes somewhere without tabs to fill them.

What has this to do with life, the universe and fish falling from the skies, you ask? Hang on and I’ll explain.

While writing my previous blog about weird weather, I came across a news item first reported I think in Australia’s Northern Territory News on 28th February. It appears that on the previous Thursday and Friday afternoons (25th and 26th February) residents of the small town of Lajamanu (population about 669) witnessed hundreds of small white fish tumbling out of the heavens. Lajamanu is literally in the middle of nowhere, on the northern edge of the very isolated (and very dry) Tanami Desert region. The fish were identified as spangled perch, which are common in northern Australia; however, the nearest large bodies of water happen to be several hundreds of miles away.

What’s also interesting is that locals reported similar showers of fish happening before, in 2004 and in 1974. It would thus appear to be a recurring freak phenomenon, although that sounds a bit like a self-contradiction.

It is events like this that get my attention, as they remind me that we do not yet know more than a tiny fraction of what is to be known in this peculiar universe we inhabit. I’m very curious about the twilight zone beyond the not-so-respectable fringes of knowledge, the territory of the paranormal, cryptids, crop circles, UFOs and the vast and baffling range of Fortean phenomena, of which the Lajamanu fishfall is a nice example. Here be many things – dragons, surely, and many other kinds of monsters, but also plenty of hoaxes, tricks, fakes, illusions, delusions and honest misunderstandings. Serious scientists hesitate to set foot in this very debatable region, and who could blame them, honestly?

Showers of fish (also frogs and other animate and inanimate objects) have been reported time out of mind. The picture I made for this blog includes a detail from a woodcut dating back to AD 1555. Pliny the Elder writes about storms of frogs and fish in Roman times. Unusual variants of this phenomenon include a fall of jellyfish-like creatures the size of shillings in Bath, England in 1894, a light dusting of venison flakes over Kentucky in 1876, a shower of 16th century coins in Russia in 1940 and a hailstorm of golf balls in Punta Gorda, Florida, in 1969.

The standard rational explanation for these events (assuming, of course, that any given report is genuine) is that the fish/frogs/golf balls et al. are vacuumed up by a passing tornado (or waterspout if over water), lifted thousands of feet into the sky and transported great distances by the winds, to be dumped elsewhere, creating an instant mystery wherever they land. Roger of Ockham would be pleased by this explanation – no multiplication of entities here! Tornados and waterspouts are things we know of – we’ve seen them, photographed them and video’d them. We know that living creatures, including cows and humans, can be sucked up into the sky by these horrors. They are indisputably in the file marked Science Fact.

There are, however, some indications that there is more to the story.

Firstly, there’s the fact that no-one appears to have witnessed or traced the entire phenomenon from start to finish. It would help immensely, for instance, if a group of reliable observers noticed a waterspout poised over a lake at point A, hoovering up its population of fish and then moving a hundred miles to the northeast where another group of reliable observers witnessed it releasing its catch over an unsuspecting village at point B. Has this ever happened? I don’t think it has (although obviously I could be wrong.)

And then there’s the fact that in many (or most?) of these cases, the contents of these showers all appear to be of the same kind of creature (recall that in the Lajamanu incident, the fish seem to have been spangled perch, presumably with few or no exceptions.) You would think that if a waterspout stole the contents of an entire pond, there would be all sorts of items – fish, frogs, clumps of weeds, the odd duck or two, a Wellington boot, a couple of car hubcaps and the rusting remains of a supermarket trolley. Why just fish, and in such numbers, too?

One valid reason for the sameness of the fish, I suppose, might be that the air currents would sort and separate the heavier objects from the lighter objects. The abandoned trolley would crash to earth the soonest, I suppose, followed by the muddy boot. If there were plenty of fish of the same kind, they would all be of a similar size and weight, and would possibly rise and fall as one, flopping out of the sky en masse, a few hours later. After all, when it hails, the hailstones tend to be all of a certain size (although it’s true that they can vary, depending on how many times each individual hailstone has travelled up and down within its stormcloud.) However, it would be lovely to have more evidence of this sort of process actually happening…

It can get very cold up in the clouds. Mark Kersemakers of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology says, of the Lajamanu fish “Once they get up into the weather system they are pretty much frozen and after some time they are released.” Which is fine, but why would they not fall as Birds Eye frozen fish, in that case? From the February report, it would appear that the fish were initially alive when they came into contact with the ground, and going by the one press photo we have as evidence, they appear to look remarkably undamaged. As a thought experiment, imagine taking a live perch up to 50,000 feet and drop it out of an aeroplane – what would it be like after being flash-frozen in mid-air, accelerating to terminal velocity (possibly thawing as it fell) and impacting against the hard surface of the desert? Not alive and not pretty, I would guess.

So I’m not absolutely convinced by the waterspout theory, although I think it’s the best we have, so far. But I won’t be drawn right now into discussing some of the more outlandish hypotheses, such as aliens, fabulous portals through time and space, or air elementals, although these are certainly fun things to discuss. The great Charles Fort himself mostly refused to speculate on the whys and wherefores of Fortean phenomena (although he did write playfully at times of an immense Sargasso Sea above our heads, from which things would fall from time to time) so I could do worse than follow his example.

Weird things keep happening, is the message I’d like to convey. Sometimes we have a breakthrough and the weirdness leads to a new realm of knowledge, as was the case with meteorites. But there always seems to be a reservoir of strange stuff at the edges of science, constantly refilling itself as we try and empty it. In fact, the universe seems a little like my never-ending jigsaw puzzle of childhood days, never quite complete, always presenting a row of empty holes for which we have no pieces – yet.

On the off-chance that there are mischievous sky-elementals haunting the world, however, it would no doubt be wise to give occasional thanks to them for providing such entertainment over the centuries. And just before each of us aficionados of the weird finally shuffles off his or her mortal coil, a short prayer to the Fortean gods might be in order.

Ending perhaps in: “So long – and thanks for all the fish”.