Cold Comfort

Alongside such comparatively trivial consequences as artificially enhanced natural disasters, mass extinction events and the end of human civilisation, it appears that climate change may also cause serious disruption to winter sports. The snowfall season is becoming noticeably shorter in Australia's imaginatively-named Snowy Mountains, and the curtailment is set to continue even in the unlikely event that effective action is taken to cut greenhouse emissions. Some fifteen paragraphs into a twenty-five-paragraph story, Britain's leading liberal newspaper gets around to mentioning the effects on the non-tourist ecology, thereby showing handily how current measures to cut emissions attained their present effectiveness.