I was photographer in residence at the welsh plant breeding station in Aberystwyth in the 1980s. There was a lovely guy in a wheelchair, Huw, who taught me a lot. He opened my eyes – I spent three months there and it was one of the best things I ever did in my life. He told me about global warming. No one knew about it then, it wasn’t in popular culture at all. And he also told me about when the phrase was first used, in Victorian times. And he also described to me what would happen and how it works. We went to the pub in Talybont. He got his pint of cider, and took a bag of demerara sugar out of his pocket. He said ‘you see that pint of cider, all the elements that make up the cider are our atmosphere. This sugar represents pollution, watch what happens’. So he got a spoonful of sugar and put it in and mixed it til it dissolved. The cider looked the same. He did it again and again and again and again. 29 times he did it and the cider looked exactly the same. On the 30th spoonful, the cider suddenly went black. Just like that. ‘That’s what we are doing’ he said. ‘That’s what we call a tipping point. And that’s a point of no return. That if we throw so much crap up into the air the atmosphere will not be able to cope with it. And that’s the danger.’ He sent a weather balloon up once, to get a sample the air from the upper atmosphere and brought it back down and put it through a spectrograph and he found grains of pollution dated from 1850 and earlier up there, still up there from the industrial revolution. Imagine what has accumulated since.
At the moment the weather still rolls in. It’s noticably milder than it has been in the 18 years I’ve been here. There’s not so much snow on the hills and it is a bit muggy in early spring and late autumn. And the frost - heavy frost is a delight. It’s uncomfortable but I’m so pleased to see it.
Well its much warmer than it was - in the winter. How many frosts have we had this year, 3? In the summer it is wetter. There are more storms. We used to grow all sorts of vegetables in the garden 20 years ago, but we can only grow a few things now - i still grow herbs, but the potatoes and other root veg just get blight and rot.
The birds are coming here much earlier than they used to. The siskins are around now [March], when they only used to come here in the summer. Plants are coming out earlier.
I’ve been farming here for 50 years. Yes, the weather has changed - I’d say the biggest difference, the one that’s affecting farming most, are the long spells of dry weather and then the long spells of wet weather. So the ground is either waterlogged or the water sources dry up and there’s no way of getting water to the cattle.
Well climate, obviously, has changed massively. The temperature. It’s like we rarely have a frost. We very rarely have snow on the ground. Even rarer it lasts. There’s snow on the mountain,s but not a lot. There’s been a lot of destruction from storms. Maybe there always has. But just when you think surely all the trees that will come down have come down, then more do. The intensity of water, of rain.
I suppose the one change I have noticed is the climate is a lot better because I can remember summers spent here when it seemed to rain perpetually for 2 or 3 weeks. And I don’t think it does anymore. I think there is a lot less rain. And certainly the stream in the garden is a lot drier.
We had 300 trees down in that storm [the beast from the east]. It was kind of a freak thing, something that might happen only once in say 500 years. The wind never comes from that direction [pointing to the North West], but it did that time. A hurricane with tornadoes and it just hit across there and bounced back and came round again and again and again. It lifted the whole roof off the barn and dumped it on the levels in Vivian Quarry. It lifted the shed off its base and dumped it in the garden next door. It split the telegraph poles and the cables came down. I was trying to move the horses and sheep because they were trying to shelter in their usual place behind the wall, and the wires were coming down on top of them. We did manage to move them but the wind lifted me up and threw me 30m away, and I was out cold for ages. It took me months to recover. You have to bolt things down here. People think screws are good enough. But screws don’t work.
