Talk in this small town of Llandrindod Wells over the past weekend focused on the Postcode Lottery. £3.2 million landed on LD1 5, where 408 punters emerged as the lucky winners, the vast majority with the minimum winnings of £4,305, which included one of my nextdoor neighbours. One fortunate fellow held three separate tickets worth £438,638 each, raking him in £1,315,914, which is apparently the biggest single win on the Postcode Lottery to date.
The lottery people turned up in force on Saturday to generate maximum publicity, taking photos of all the winners in front of their shiny, bright, red front door, giving out red woolly hats to make the winners stand out, and hoping to light up multiple Facebook pages with millions of red heart icons. The clear message being that we could also have been winners, if only we had coughed up just a few quid every month. I won diddly squat, therefore I have to come to terms with being a loser.
I have to wonder how many of the 408 lucky winners of the lottery will give any thought towards the climate and ecological emergency when they make choices over how they spend their winnings and how much will be put back into the local economy? I know from the limited conversations I’ve had, together with overheard ones, that the sorts of things the money will be spent on includes: a new phone or two, a bigger tv, towards a new horse, a vehicle, a cruise, and a nice holiday somewhere warm. The latter seemed to be a popular choice. Some folk expressed disappointment that the amount was not enough, but perhaps they could always ask for their money back..
Meanwhile, in the small pond at the back of my flat another event, akin to a lottery, was taking place silently, unseen and unpublicised. On Sunday night the first frog spawn of 2024 had appeared, nearly a fortnight earlier than last year and earlier than any other spawn I have recorded in the pond so far. As far as I can discover, this is the earliest on record for this part of mid Wales. It is an annual lottery because, of the hundreds of eggs laid by every female frog, only a small percentage, perhaps 1-2%, will reach adulthood and breeding age. Life is a real challenge for each egg: to pass through the tadpole stage and then to even have a chance of crawling out of the pond on four tiny limbs. This year’s spawning amounted to less than the last, as well as the first where the number of spawns has not increased, which could be because there is so much available standing water on the ground.
Climate scientists measure the extent of the planet’s heating in parts per million of carbon dioxide, in fractions of degrees Centigrade, in square kilometres of Antarctic and Arctic ice loss, and so on. The early arrival of frogspawn is also a clear local indicator of the rapid rate at which the climate is changing, particularly when the trend is consistently earlier spawning, year upon year. It may not be an exact science but it is still an indicator we should not ignore.
Compared to winning the lottery these changes might not seem apparent nor dramatic to so many people, who are just carrying on with their daily lives. However, they will seem trivial compared to the irreversible impacts of the increasingly extreme climatic changes arriving. Frogs and amphibians in general are good indicator species, like the proverbial canary in a coalmine, they are showing us how fast things are changing if we chose to pay attention to them.
When the lottery winners are planning their holidays in the sun, they are gambling on the weather and relying on past patterns, seemingly discounting the chances of dramatic weather events interfering with their holiday, as these events unfold with ever greater regularity in all corners of the world. No where is immune to the floods, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, landslides and wildfires.
Devastating wildfires in Chile, astonishing rainfall across California, record January temperatures in Spain and the UK, record heat in Western Australia, huge snowfalls in Japan, a new category 6 to measure the increasing power of hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons and lots more wild weather across the planet – and it’s only early February. 2024 is going to be one hell of a year.
We have all been drawn into a global lottery, one which most of us have not chosen to enter. It is the Climate Lottery. We are all in it, and it’s hard to see where any winners might be. A tiny minority will make financial profits, perhaps hoping to then escape to Mars, but there are certainly going to be millions upon millions of losers.
