It's like raaaaiiiinnn on our wedding day

We got married last week.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a worrier - and the wedding was no exception. Although, to be fair, my partner coming down with a stomach-bug the night before and a forecast straight from the fantasies of people who believe in global cooling, actually, I think, offered some real reasons for concern.

So there I was, at midnight, listening to rain stampede across the roof and the sound of intermittent vomiting when I started thinking: why do we fret about rain on our wedding day? Presumably not just because Alanis Morrisette thinks it's ironic. Obviously, it's a logistical pain but I decided our wedding weather anxieties stem from something else:

Life has its challenges, with those unexpected often being the worst. So it's only natural, when you make a commitment to try and spend the rest of your days together, to start wondering what might or might not come to pass, and to - all of a sudden - feel very much in the hands of fate. Which, in turn, makes good luck seem awfully important.

And so, perhaps, we worry about rain on our wedding day, for the most part, because it feels like a test case - an example of the luck we may or may not experience through the rest of our married lives.

Now, obviously, this line of thinking was hardly helping my nerves (was that a clap of thunder?!) so I changed tack a bit:

Realistically, rationally, the things that matter most are those that we can affect - right? Not the coalitions of chance we call luck. And I figured that even if my partner was ill, and even if it started to hail, the really important thing - and the precedent that mattered most - was that we'd find a way of making the day work regardless. And, in turn, hopefully, our lives together. While there's no certainty, it was, I discovered, much easier to feel confident of our ability to overcome bad things than to hope they never happened.

Anyhow, as it came to pass, I never really needed to convince myself of all this. On the day, her stomach held and the weather broke. And we got married outside under cloudy but dry skies, while up the end of the valley the Tararuas were painted white by freshly fallen snow.

Oh my Gored

As temperatures rise, denier tactics plunge. They're now doctoring Al Gore interviews so they can claim he is being misleading about science.

Gore's law plus active dishonesty - these people can not be called sceptics in any reasonable sense of the term.

Via comments at Deltoid.

How many...

Inspired by Gareth, I couldn't resist:

Q: How many climate sceptics does it take not to change a light bulb?

A: Approximately 100. 1 to say that the current absence of light is the result of natural solar cycles and the other 99 to disseminate this finding through their 'science organisations' and oil industry funded think tanks.

[Update: This is cool. Robert Butler, the author of the original climate change light bulb joke has blogged about the spread of the meme, very kindly stating that my own humble attempt above is his favourite derivative thus far. Thanks Robert!]

More Great Climate Change Humour...

...at Gareth's place.