Interviewer Right...

Speaker A … and she said, ‘Put your nose into it and tell me what you can smell.' I put my nose into it and I couldn't smell a thing at all, absolutely nothing at all. And she laid me down and half an hour of needles later, I got up and she said, 'I have a smell of the rose again,' and I put my nose into it and there was this faint, faint odour of rose, which was quite the most beautiful thing I've ever smelt in my entire life.

Interviewer It came straight away then?

Speaker A No, well, over the course of the next two weeks, very, very slowly it came back. I was walking down Old Compton Street and a woman walked past and I went 'Ooh perfume', and I literally turned and followed her, if she'd seen me she would have thought I was rather weird because I was sort of, had my nose into her hair like that, so, and it all came back.

Speaker B Ever since my children were born, well, even before my children were born, which is a very very long time ago now, we've used alternative medicine, or I like to call it complementary medicine, we use homeopathy. And none of my children ever had an antibiotic when they were growing up, and I think that's quite a good claim, actually.

T. 21

Weather and climate

Tim: Some people say, good, it’s great if the world’s warming up. We’ll have better holidays. But if they stopped to think for a second, they’d realize it’s serious. I mean, if it gets warmer, it stands to reason that more water will evaporate from the oceans and surely that means more storms somewhere else. There’s evidence that there are more storms, hurricanes and so on and that they’re more intense. Now that more accurate records are kept we can see that global warming is a fact.

Another aspect of global warming is how this will affect the sea level; it’ll definitely rise. I read something recently which suggested that the sea might rise by as much as half a metre over this century, you know, because as the ice melts, the oceans expand. Imagine what effect that’ll have on low-lying areas around the world.

Another thing that gets me is that we know all this and yet we’re not reducing our greenhouse gas emissions anything like fast enough to stop the effects of climate change. We might be able to slow it down a bit but I think that’s all.

Wendy: I know it seems as if there are more cases of extreme weather, like floods and droughts, but I wonder if it’s only that we hear about them more than before because of the news on TV and the fact that now it’s easier to communicate world events to everyone and very quickly. Surely there’s always been severe weather. Storms are a natural phenomenon, after all.

Ok, I admit there is evidence of global warming, but is there evidence to show that that’s what’s causing severe weather? Wouldn’t we have had these hurricanes and so on anyway? I mean nobody even really knows how storms form and the path they’ll take. You see, what it is, is that the consequences are much greater these days are much greater these days. The world is more densely populated so in terms of the effect on population and financial loss the results are more devastating. But perhaps we should study the data more rather than the hype.

Everybody’s heard of El Nino and La Nina and I must admit that that must be showing something, but from what I hear the jury’s still out on whether it’s global warming that’s exacerbating events.

T. 22